nonetheless

Save the Robots operated at 25 Avenue B—near the corner of Second Street, a notorious heroin cop spot—as a semi-legal underground club. Club kids, drag queens, and bar employees from other establishments finally off work after 4 a.m. were frequent customers.

Vintage ads for downtown clubs from the 1980s (Ephemeral New York)

more on save the robots from mr. beller’s neighborhood

Max: I’m too nostalgic. I’ll admit it.
Skippy: We graduated four months ago. What can you possibly be nostalgic for?
Max: I’m nostalgic for conversations I had yesterday. I’ve begun reminiscing events before they even occur. I’m reminiscing this right now. I can’t go to the bar because I’ve already looked back on it in my memory… and I didn’t have a good time.

to all you college graduates out there, go see this film, this is what it was like graduating in the ’90s — it’s about best friends fresh out of college and anxious about what to do next and the endless indecisions that plague them; an ironic reality that most of us seem to face at some point in our lives…

not much different than today or any other generations, really. but watch it for the urbane wit but shot-through with a virulent darkness that makes the tone consistently ambiguous, nonetheless…

p.s.

saw this at cineplex odeon’s worldwide cinemas for $2. the theater would show movies right before they are available in dvd, blu-ray, netflix vhs

the theater is now part of another glass condo, of course,

The East Village art scene—that heady mid-eighties era when uptown collectors elbowed out Avenue B junkies—is about to be memorialized was memorialized by a New Museum show.

One of the more pointed critics of the time recalls the worst excesses of that art movement—and the (infinitely cooler) neighborhood that it eclipsed.

Memories of the East Village Art Scene (NYM)

Bathers at Steeplechase Park, 1919, by E.E. Rutter

coney island before the imminent gentrification

Nickel Empire consists of over two dozen vintage photographs of Coney Island dating from 1889 to 1948, displaying in rare clarity the twentieth century’ s great American playground, once described as “Sodom by the sea.” Coney Island was a sanctioned escape from—and alternative to—everyday reality.

Nickel Empire: Coney Island Photographs 1889-1948, at Schroeder Romero & Shredder, in Chelsea  now thru 2/26.

Christmas eve. Times Square is empty, darkened by closed shops and shut-down signs. Only the Fascination Playlands seems to be enjoying a normal business, and the dinging bell signaling another lucky winner at dime a throw tic-tac-toe can be heard for blocks. What few lights there are flash and blink…twinkle, if you will, through the frozen air. You walk the streets, and you figure Christmas comes to Times Square at an oblique angle.

…

One of the lights up the street blinks on and off in reds and yellows. “Girls — Beautiful — Girls” for dancing at the Tango Palace, 1 p.m. to 4 a.m. The doorway to the place is adorned with tinted likenesses of busty babes with rosy cheeks, decked out in slinky floor-length gowns of satin and velvet and sequins. They smile with teeth that are whiter than white, and on a street where the Castro Convertible showroom is an oasis of sanity, on a night when you’ve got a head full of whory memories and visions of dancing sugarplums, the ladies are desperately real.

…

~ Silent night, lonely night at the Tango Palace

an ice cream for the rest of us — festivus ice cream

store window, circa 1940’s, at B. Altman and Company (closed on December 31, 1989)

Santa Claus skipped over the B. Altman and Company department store in midtown Manhattan yesterday. In fact, he did not appear once during the entire Christmas shopping season. He had been cut from the budget.

— At B. Altman, Christmas but No Santa (nyt, originally published December 25, 1989)

  [building is now occupied by Oxford University Press, New York Public Library’s Science, Industry, and Business Library, and CUNY Graduate Center]

related: Department Stores’ Coming of Age (wnyc)

the audience, where they yell back lines at the screen during the extended pauses between dialogue, dress up in costume and act out the film, and throw props various times during the film, at a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show at the 8th Street Playhouse in the west village, circa 90’s.

… Where have you gone, chicken chow mein?

Why the regret over this dish, once the quintessential Chinese food in the city, and now slipping quietly from the consciousness of New Yorkers, just like some of the most treasured memories of childhood.

Chow mein had a noirish feel: This steaming bowl of old-style Cantonese fare evoked those exciting old films where streetwise private eyes or slick criminals slipped out of a cold drizzle and into a mysterious velvet booth. After ordering rudely from an obsequious waiter, they would shovel down the food and plot how to hide a stiff or blow a safe.

In Search of Chow Mein (nyt)

(pic via the sartorialist)