I am currently working on my graduate school thesis and have decided to write about how the Upper West Side has changed in my lifetime. The drug store on 74th and Broadway was Ritob. It is the same one in which I grew up four decades ago, and its buildings and landmarks and topography are almost entirely unchanged. I was even blessed to attend LaGuardia high school on 135th & Convent Avenue in its glorious Gothic, castle-like home before it moved to its prison-like building at Lincoln Center. Police flooded the area. And the biggest, most heartbreaking loss la fortuna, hangout of John and yoko. I think its just human nature. The Dead Poet is really just a solid neighborhood bar. Columbus tween 70,71. Back in the days prostitues freely roamed Broadway, drug addicts shot up in our basement, wed look out our living room window And see prostitues making their deals. Of the 35 brownstones that lined the block, only seven remain today. Please enter your email address. Thanks for posting this article. I was also hailed from second story windows in Times Square by topless prostitutes. Not how it was for me, my friends, and their families. A least some or all of my family lived on the Upper West Side from the 1930s to the mid 1980s. Friday's location on the Upper East Side. The neighborhood has lost many small businesses such as delis, bodegas, pizzerias, barber shops, candy & stationery stores. The Upper West Side of Manhattan is sandwiched in between Riverside Park to the west & Central Park to the east. 4.3. The statistics for the 24th Precinct offer the most dramatic portrait of the vertiginous rise of crime and its exhilarating plunge. Our parents let us run around unsupervised from the time we were like, 8 or 9. I need a hot tip on a small apartment! Get the latest in beer, wine, and cocktail culture sent straight to your inbox. I remember Gleasons, and ONealsand the Flower Shop next to ONeals. Booked 14 times today. Over the course of the next four years, 20 houses on the block would be demolished and replaced with a high school named for Louis Brandeis and a relocated elementary school. They have a bunch of beers on tap that you definitely wont find on the shelves at Whole Foods, and the dark space works well for a low-key drink with a couple friends. It is bounded by Central Park on the east, the Hudson River on the west, West 59th Street to the south, and West 110th Street to the north. Tiny place, sweet lady from down south. It is an expensive place to live, but then it always was. There were prostitutes and drug dealers on the street. I dont understand the folks who insist the 70s werent terrible. Some similarities within 1970s and 2015 and much change.Miss Most: John Lennon and Yoko Ono walks and talksMick JaggerMiles Davis..Bruce Willistending barJoan Allenhostess at Shelterbunch of artists, actors, musicians at The Only Child on West 79. Within 18 months, several more "singles bars" were opened on 1st Avenue. Would it be meaningful to a visitor in 2010 to know that Isaac Bashevis Singer lived in the Belnord on 86th and Broadway; that Singers brother Israel Joshua set the final section of his magnificent novel of German Jewry, The Family Carnovsky, at 94th and West End; that the composer Sergei Rachmaninoff spent his final years at 84th and West End? But Malachy's a fixture on West 72nd Street off Columbus Ave. since the late '80s is the kind of place people like "because it's old and ugly," insisted Mike Mishkin, owner of . While I do not mourn the nabe of the 70s, and I miss the more diverse neighborhood, the mom-and-pop stores, the real neighborhood feeling that has changed. By the early 1970s, 20 to 25 percent of American couples had met at a bar, according to Stanford University research. Im trying to jog my memory about a pastry cafe that always had recorded opera music playing and photos of opera singers on the walls I believe it was below 74th and above 66th and between Columbus and CPW. Zabars was open until midnight. Although the Upper East Side is generally considered the more expensive side, when it comes to renting in 2022, the Upper West Side takes the cake. The 40,000 Jews who lived there in 1960 were primarily secular and in flight from their faith. Working there I was held up at gun point at the 85th street location and the 99th street location. 1980s-1990s: Boy Bar (15 St. Marks Pl.) Bear Bar (west side) 2156 Broadway (between 74th & 75th St.) Beer Hall. Go to George Keeley. Here is a nice trip down memory lane of the 1980's! View Website Earn 3X Points. I called my dad from a pay phone and he said to go into the coffee shop on the corner in the hotel and dont move! )Lantern (78th and Amsterdam, where Planet Sushi is now). If you're heading to the Upper West Side to see a Humperdinck fairy tale opera at Lincoln Center, you might just need a drink beforehand. Please. Life is rough on everyone. Dreamstime is the world`s largest stock photography community. The business I miss? I've always been a pretty good cook, and I could make these very good dinners in this tiny kitchen. The destruction and construction took years, leaving behind rubble that became at-hand weaponry for kids and gangsters and boarded-up tenements that became crime sites and drug dens. My small city could have been one of those static, increasingly impoverished, blighted places. Apologies for coming to this conversation rather late but felt compelled to share my experience of the UWS. My children, who are very young, will know, as my sisters and I did, the oddity of being both entirely privileged and yet significantly poorer than most of their classmates and friends. But over the past 20 years in particular, the Upper West Side has turned into the most affluent shtetl the world has ever seen. A pair of cops who had been permanently assigned to the block because of previous incidents fired eight shots into the air in an effort to still the melee but were engulfed by the crowd.. As an 80s kid, the name cracked me up, it sounded so dated, and even then I could see they where from another time, and I appreciated that. It was known for its burgers, hot dogs, and milkshakes. Today: About 90% of the mom and pop stores on Broadway between 91st and 85th St. have closed. 4) Someone else mentioned it, but Ill second a nod to Teachers and Teachers, Too. Source. Once, after I was punched, my wallet stolen, my glasses (!) My father, and then my mother ran the Thalia Theatre from the 1930s to the 1970s, so I guess I would qualify as someone who know what the Upper West Side was like before 1976, when no one would live above 72nd street if they could avoid it. I remember way before Charivari when the drugstore was on the corner of 72nd and Columbus, across the street from Merit Farms. I remember Zabars being a nice little store to buy deli and grocery items. UPPER WEST SIDE, NY An Upper West Side joint was just named among the best sports bars in New York City. pulled from my face, and my sneakers removed outside the side exit to the Olympia movie theater on 107th between Broadway and Amsterdam, my parents called the police and two mammoth cops showed up and drove me around the neighborhood looking for my two assailants by checking out sneakers. I also like to point it out when kvetchers say the area is too fancy now. Like Caledonia, the Hamilton has a very serious whiskey selection - although the focus here is more on American whiskey. You make it sound like the wild west which it was not. (The 20th, in which West 84th Street sits, has become somewhat more, as they say in the census, Caucasian.) Since I live only a mile from where I was born and raised, with only slight changes to the visual landscape, I find myself constantly under nostalgias threat. All the small stores have had to vacate once their leases were up and the rents were jacked up to unaffordable rents. Youre on the Upper West Side, and you want to drink beer. In the same way, standing on a Thursday evening in front of the building in which I was born and raised, I am suddenly in the hazy light of an early Sunday morning at the age of six and managing for the first time to right the bicycle from which the training wheels had lately been removed and then wobbling my way down the block and around the corner and around the second corner and then around the thirdand slamming the bike into a toddler who was wobbling his way forward in front of his building. What about doing a simple Lexis-Nexis search? The Upper West Side is a great place to live: beautiful prewar buildings, Central Park to one side and Riverside Park to the other, Zabar's.It's one of the most popular residential areas of Manhattan and it's also a hotbed for celebrities. I am offended by the tone in this article. Lets not forget about the orginal frozen cappuccinos on Columbus Avenue before Starbucks. An article on the front page of the New York Times on July 6, 1961, reported: Street fighting involving 400 Puerto Ricans and Negroes broke out in a West Side trouble block. Two women began arguing over a man, and a brawl erupted. Kyle: When I moved here, the hotspot was 8 th Avenue between 14 th and 23rd. Retroclubnyc is New York City and Manhattan's best club to celebrate a birthday party, bachelor party, bachelorette party, anniversary party, or engagement party! Of course I have lived elsewhere, including the Adirondacks (for college), the Catskills (for work with Goddard-Riverside Community Center residential summer camps) and Dallas, TX for work. Today is tomorrow's yesterday . Photograph: Paul Wagtouicz. Pretty good ice cream place in the early 80s. Unfortunately, mom and pop stores have closed. I moved up here in 1977. These days, double-decker tourist buses travel the streets of the Upper West Side, and I cant imagine what narration the guides offer besides pointing out various spots at which the various incarnations of the Law and Order television series have been filmed on location. I never felt unsafe in this neighborhood, however. While any such demolition of livable housing stock would be greeted with cries of horror today from poverty advocates and landmarking experts, the policy was stronglyadvocated by neighborhood clergy, who had high hopes that the struggling poor could make a better life in public housing. I also remember that the Upper West Side was a true neighborhood, and I remember the slow and then really fast gentrification of the neighborhood in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Columbia university kept the neighborhood more desirable. Bring a few relatives you havent seen in a while. I am still amazed thinking how that now-pristine block was so different. This big bar on Amsterdam Ave feels like the kind of place you might have gone junior year, complete with foosball, pool tables, and, yes, intense games of beer pong. The Upper West Side ( UWS) is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. Free or royalty-free photos and images. Use them in commercial designs under lifetime, perpetual & worldwide rights. Finding a place to grab a drink on the Upper West Side is not a difficult task, however, there are some bars worth visiting more than others especially if you're looking for a specific vibe or ambiance. (Photo by Steven Siegel) Demolition began later that decade, which displaced the homeless who had by that point found shelter on the elevated roadway. He lived on 75th Bet. I loved visiting the pet dept downstairs there and often dreamt of freeing all the fish and parakeets to Central Park down the block. I take issue with the notion that people tried to avoid living above 72nd street. I love being able to walk to Central Park and be greeted by many people I have met over the years. loved chariivari but those prices! So many more. Perhaps someone at the Synagogue would know as I believe it was about the same time the Synagogue was built (Prior to 1978.) Now its a zoo. In 1983, a sociologist named Richard Shafer told the New York Times, The West Side is a neighborhood that always seems to embarrass the fashionable. Its most attractive streets were and are no match architecturally or decoratively for the boulevards of the East Side, Fifth and Park Avenues. The broken windows theory propounded by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling in 1983 has entered into the realm of clichthe idea that if you dont replace a broken window on an abandoned building, more of the windows will be broken and the area around them will decay as well. Another one had South American clothes but the name has vanished from mind. According to a 1966 study, out of 150,000 residents, 105,000 were white (of whom 40,000 were Jews); 26,000 came from Spanish-speaking homes; and 18,000 were black. Which makes sense, seeing as the space is decorated like an 18th-century tavern, complete with a portrait of Alexander Hamilton. Social workers divided the block into three play sectors, with adults playing volleyball, teenagers playing inside at a youth center, and younger children the east end. Six months later, the Times declared that the problem had been managed: Worst Is Over on West 84th Street. The solution was depopulation and destruction: The Department of Real Estate reported that 709 families had moved or been relocated from buildings due to give way for new schools. Only then it was called slum clearance and urban renewal. Is that what a Harvard education gets you these days? I lived on 79th street from 1976 to 2011 in the rent-stabilized apartment I grew up in, and over that time I have seen the neighborhood change drastically. This article is so one-side. . Every corner has a bank or a Duane Reade Pharmacy and almost all of the mom-and -pop businesses have been run out due to rent increases. People were afraid to ride the graffiti-streaked, crime soaked subways. They've generously opened up their lobby by transforming it into a cafe and bar inspired by the aesthetic of speakeasies of the 1920's. The Cozy Bar (The Dead Poet) I remember Mindys and the Japanese store and Francess Hats and the Chinese Restaurant and Jays Stationary and Cake Masters and Eclairs and the Chess Room and the pet store between Columbus and Broadway on 72nd street. .css-gdccrc{font-family:var(--chakra-fonts-condensed);font-weight:700;font-size:1rem;line-height:0.9;letter-spacing:0.08em;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-0);margin-left:var(--chakra-space-0);margin-right:var(--chakra-space-0);margin-bottom:var(--chakra-space-0);text-transform:uppercase;}@media screen and (min-width: 20rem){.css-gdccrc{line-height:0.9;}}@media screen and (min-width: 23.4375rem){.css-gdccrc{line-height:0.9;}}@media screen and (min-width: 37.5rem){.css-gdccrc{line-height:1;}}Bryan Kim & Matt Tervooren.css-1a7ccww{font-family:var(--chakra-fonts-body);font-weight:400;margin:var(--chakra-space-0);padding:var(--chakra-space-0);font-size:0.6875rem;letter-spacing:0.1em;line-height:1;text-transform:uppercase;}@media screen and (min-width: 37.5rem){.css-1a7ccww{font-size:0.75rem;letter-spacing:0.12em;}}October 4, 2018. I would agree that the author should be careful not to stereotype new residents as unfriendly and uninterested in the neighborhood. Silly me. It feels sort of like a big, slightly divey rec room, with brick walls, a shuffleboard table, and photos of various people named Bob up on the wall. Some favorite places included Ruskays and Rouelles. Go on Mondays for live jazz. Here's a spindly, stand-alone piece of the High Line that has since vanished . The neighborhoods smattering of Orthodox residents did little to manifest their observance publicly. I lived on the UWS from 1972-1994: 85/WEA, 79/Columbus, 82/Amsterdam, several other addresses. That mugging was nothing unusual. I was born and raised on same block, in same building since 1969. Before wine bars, bank branches, and sushi restaurants took over the East Village, there were hole-in-the-wall clubs like 8BC, a gallery and performance space on Eighth Street between Avenues B and C. Opened in 1983, the place was over by the end of 1985. Don't worry though there is a bar in the front and back of the house in case it gets too crowded. Gone were the days when people indulged in a nice restaurant dinner only when traveling or celebrating a birthday or anniversary. I also went to IS 44 and was blessed with being part of the Lab School which was the vision of Mr. John Gatto. I know Im not imagining it existed. 5) There was a little magazine stand on the west side of street around Columbus and 83 or 84 was it called Johnnys? The streets were full of prostitutes and Johns cruising for them. and the Pyramid Club (101 Ave. A) become playgrounds for East Village New Wavers. Get a table or some bar seats at Dive Bar, a dimly-lit spot with over 30 beers on tap (most of which are available by the glass, growler, and pitcher). Restaurants. Coolsingel Street Cam, Rotterdam. Abandoned West Side Highway, circa 1980. Its a little spot decorated like a living room in a very nice apartment, and they serve top-notch cocktails. And Silk Road. In the early '80s, Mimi Sheraton rhapsodized over the apps: " [The] possibilities are extraordinary, whether you choose the puffy, crisp-crusted Alsatian onion tart, the fine juniper-perfumed duck. never went in but loved that name was there til the 80s. John was a amazing teacher and he taught me to love learning! 29 Second Ave. (between 1st & 2nd St.) My favorite dart bar in 1982. I was 14 in 1977 and went to see laser rock at the planetarium with a girlfriend. Particularly the buffalo wings, which are some of the best in the city. Some of that was due to the destruction of housing not only by the citys own slum-clearance policies but also by the ravages of rent controls that led to the abandonment of hundreds of thousands of apartments. Its population was 715,522 at the 2020 census, a 19.22% increase since 2010. That was true between broadway and central park west. Over 25 years, we lived in 3 apartments, none more than 4 blocks from Fairway. Worth a read. Kelly Ramos: Favorite wings in the entire city. Usually, when we talk about the differences in American life between past and present, there is a moment in which we feel compelled to denounce todays pathologies in comparison with the moral certainties of older times. I always saw it as culturally vital and architecturally beautiful. Outside the Apthorp there were streetwalking prostitutes. Does anyone remember, like i do, the little grocery store on the corner of 74th and Amsterdam, owned by Dom?wonderful man, full of stories and gossip about the neighborhoodwhen the subway fare went up in 74 or 75, he bought me a bag of tokens so that i wouldnt have to stand in line at the 72nd St. station that Monday morning when it went into effect and everyone had been caught unawareDom always looked out for his customersa real UWS personality. At least when talking about fairly genteel nabes as we are here. They have an enormous scotch selection, a large number of snifters, and plenty of Irish and American whiskey as well. Grew up in Lincoln Towers in the 70s and 80s. Residents sold their used household goods at White Elephant tables, others grilled hotdogs and popped popcorn. Not the Hollywood stars with a party pad in some flashy glass tower downtown, but the ones who really live here. Despite the name, Dive 75 isnt actually that divey. I well remember the Woolworths on Amsterdam, but am at a loss to recall just when it was demolished. .I could not get the police or the sanitation department to stop the airmail so I collected it. I worked at Sweet Asylum in the early 80s and have tons of memories about the old neighborhood: everything from the charred remains of Santeria rituals on the big rock ACROSS from the 79th st. RSD playground to routinely getting mugged. They had several boutiques and I spent a lot of dough there over the years, The folded in the early 90s I think. Indeed, the diseases afflicting the underclass surfaced on the Upper West Side perhaps earlier than anywhere else, leading to large-scale social experimentation of a sort that would not be practiced today. The sidewalks teemed with alcoholic homeless Vietnam Vets haunted by their own nightmares and hopelessness. You couldnt walk down my side street without seeing at least one car window smashed. My car was broken into 3 times in my first year here. By 1990, there were 5,641 felonies. Either way, it's there, and it's good. 2 All-American Burger Kai L./Yelp Ive lived as far north as 110th street and as south at 80th. Usually the small cities in America that never change are the ones whose best days came half a century or more ago and are now literally rotting away before your eyes, their once-handsome houses mottling, their fences akimbo, their storefronts boarded, their grass untended, their gas stations abandoned on windblown corners. That one of NYC's best sushi restaurants would also be among its most expensive is mostly expected, but it was surprising when . Rare images of NYC nightclubs from the 1980s and '90s, including the Limelight and Roxy | amNewYork Entertainment Rare images of NYC nightclubs from the 1980s and '90s, including the Limelight. @Janet, I agree. The Upper West Side is New York City's definitive neighborhood: a polyglot collection of fine architecture, bustling street life, diverse cultures and strong civic activism. Email me if you want to answer a few questions. 3) Back in the 80s, H & H Bagels (well known demise some years ago) had lines out the door, and nicer prices for their delicious bagels. a retired 31-year veteran NYC high school teacher. Im trying to remember the name of the bar/restaurant that opened in the late 70s/1980 on the corner of 79th and Columbus with the funeral parlor next door (in the space where Laura Ashley once was located) and in the old building before the skyscraper apartment building went up. And in part it was due to the difficulty the media had, even in the wake of the 1960s, reporting on the details of the crime (the New York Times, in every one of the fiveonly five!articles it published on the case, referred vaguely to sexual mutilation). But in 1976, when my parents moved to Broadway and 79th street with their three small children, no one in Manhattan lived above 72nd street if they could avoid it. I do remember cake masters on 99 street, party cake on 110, teachers, the gold rail, the American restaurant on 85 & Broadway. Tags: Big Nick's Burger and Pizza Joint, East Village Eye, East Village in the 1980s, Lou Reed, New York City 1984, old pizza parlors New York City, Upper West Side in the 1980s, Velvet Underground Just be aware that the whole place might smell like truffles, since they serve various truffle- and non-truffle-related snacks. My father was the first tenant of the building and moved in in 1929. 114 tips and reviews. I well remember when the wrecking ball destroyed the beautiful and historic Episcopal Church on W. 71st Street at the corner of Broadway. Like Caledonia, the Hamilton has a very nice apartment, and milkshakes the sanitation department to the... Take issue with the notion that people tried to avoid living above 72nd street live upper west side bars 1980s streets were of... 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