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What New York Was Like in the Early ’80s — Hour by Hour

Caroline BankoffHeather CorcoranNancy Hass and

Kate Guadagnino and

A chance encounter with David Bowie at a downtown nightclub. Boozy, drug-fueled parties that lasted until dawn. A walk across the Williamsburg Bridge — just to save a subway token. Mornings spent alone, writing in a studio in the West Village. Afternoon workouts. Dinner on the Upper East Side with a former president of the United States. These are the moments, large and small, recounted by 36 writers, artists, fashion designers, musicians and more who lived in New York City in the early ’80s. Together, this chorus of voices — assembled, edited and condensed — creates a compelling mosaic, revealing a city bustling with creativity but also slowly emerging from its recent near-bankruptcy, with upscale restaurants just blocks away from rubble-filled, graffiti-painted lots. Whether you were struggling, successful or just plain lucky, these stories remind us that in these years New York City — dirty, dangerous, derelict, dazzling — was the only place to be.

I was in my early 30s, and I had Tatiana and Alex, my children, so I didn’t stay out until dawn like I had in the 1970s. But at midnight, yes, I was often out. Studio 54 was over after the owners, Steve [Rubell] and Ian [Schrager], got arrested in 1980, so we all migrated to the Mudd Club, on White Street. Or I would throw a party. I was living uptown — really the classic “uptown,” which, because I was young, seemed a little wild to some people — with my kids and my mother (also, at that time I was in love with a Brazilian man I’d met in Bali). The apartment, at 1060 Fifth Avenue, at 87th Street, was like a fantasy apartment — huge, with a view of the reservoir. A lot of very creative, brilliant people were living in rough places downtown, which was dangerous but cheap, but I never did. (I might be the only person who never lived in a scary New York apartment. I came here from Europe at age 22 in the 1960s already married and went to Park Avenue.) If I threw a party, by midnight there was probably an especially good mix of people there. Richard Gere was a fixture, as well as Diana Ross and Princess Caroline. I served eggplant parmigiana and a stupendous chocolate cake that everyone always wanted. I suppose I should have loved New York; things were very good for me. But truthfully, I hated it. You could feel it turning, the tackiness beginning to creep in. Reagan really ruined it for me. And shoulder pads. And the hair. And “Dynasty.” I’ve never gotten over “Dynasty.” And then people started dying. I realized I had to leave. By 1984, I’d put my kids in boarding school and left to live in Paris for five years.

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Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth performing at CBGB in 1983.Credit...Stephanie Chernikowski/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

When I first moved to the city, there was a garbage strike. I was hustling. I had a horrible graveyard shift at a coffee shop, one of the only places to eat in Chelsea, open 24 hours — super crickets, deserted. I worked part-time for gallerist Annina Nosei. She and Larry Gagosian had this space, it was a condo loft in a building on West Broadway. [By 1 a.m.] I’d be somewhere like [the TriBeCa No Wave club] Tier 3, seeing [the electronic Berlin band] Malaria!, and then walking over to Dave’s Luncheonette. A lot of the alternative spaces — Franklin Furnace, A-Space — had music, too. Hearing hip-hop on the street, minimalist new music, free jazz — it all added to this fabric that was a landscape.

I was kind of tomboyish, but also pretty poor. I had glasses, so I put these flip-up sunglass visors on them. But I didn’t feel super cool or anything. The people who were chic, the downtowners, pretty much just wore black — that could instantly give you a look. Our first goal [as Sonic Youth] was getting a gig at CBGB. Then it was getting a good time slot at CBGB, so you weren’t on last and weren’t on first. CB’s wasn’t the best sound; it was such a long and narrow space that if it was crowded you couldn’t really see anything, unless you were standing on the side of the stage, and then you just heard the stage sound. Sometimes it could just be too blasting. It wasn’t actually the best place to hear or see bands, but it was always exciting. Then later, it became about getting a gig at Danceteria, Mudd Club — they were all little milestone achievements.

Hear Kim Gordon recount her first impressions of New York City:


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James Brown and the Rev. Al Sharpton (right) backstage at Madison Square Garden on June 11, 1974.Credit...Waring Abbott/Getty Images

People say that Manhattan was dirty and dangerous in the early ’80s, and I just have to laugh. Do you even think about what it was like in Brooklyn? I mean, that’s when Brooklyn was Brooklyn, not some extension of the West Village or a place with good coffee. Things were 50 times as bad in Brooklyn as they were in Manhattan. In 1981, I had just gotten back from six months on the road with James Brown. Everyone writes that I was his tour manager, but that’s not what it was. He had always been like a surrogate father to me, and when his manager quit midway through the tour, he called me to come and just make sure people weren’t ripping him off at the venues every night. He needed someone he trusted. Everyone associates me with Jesse Jackson, but actually James Brown is the person I consider most like a mentor. The whole reason I was able to raise money for my causes was because of him. His name opened every door for me.

It was the tale of two cities back then, and I was in my late 20s, trying to get the message out, running the National Youth Movement out of an office in St. Mary’s Hospital in Bed-Stuy. The whole thing finally fell into place in May of that year when I went on Tom Snyder’s show on NBC. He was like the Jimmy Fallon or Trevor Noah of that era. His show was on at 1 a.m., after Johnny Carson. Not only did Mr. Brown come on with me, but Muhammad Ali did, too. It was the three of us. It changed everything. It made the general public aware that people were dying in Brooklyn, in Harlem, in the Bronx. James Brown and Ali — because of them, I basically became a made guy.

I lived on the quiet end of Hollis, Queens. The whole neighborhood was a lower-middle class suburban area. Every parent, every grown-up was your mother and father. It was like a village, y’know? You couldn’t do nothing stupid or bad because your friend’s mother was your mother, too.

The first single we ever made [was in 1983]: “Sucker M.C.’s” was the B-side of “It’s Like That.” “It’s Like That” was a record that was talking about all of the things that was going on in communities, society and also the world. It’s basically the most conscious, relatable record. And then we said, “We gotta do the real hip-hop that we’re actually doing at the block parties and at the house parties and at the park parties.” So we decided to make it all beat — no music, just me and Run [Joseph Simmons, another founding member of Run-DMC] doing the real hardcore, just rhyming on this record. That was “Sucker M.C.’s.”

I was still living at home. I was just out of high school. I was preparing that summer to start my first semester at St. John’s University. We recorded at a studio called Greene Street Recording Studio on Greene Street between Houston and Prince. I will never forget the day, because I didn’t tell my mother and father that I was going to make a record. I just left the house on a Sunday, went to make the record. And I got in trouble because I didn’t get home until like 1 or 2 in the morning. When me and Run would go to each other’s houses and rap together, we would go into the attic. And when my mother asked me where I was at, I just said, “Oh, I was in the attic.”

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Writer Brad Gooch’s modeling card, 1981.Credit...A Peter Marlowe Composite Card

Jumbo-sized martini glasses smeared with ruby lipstick. A cracked bathroom mirror reflecting a sink full of discarded puffs, eyeliner brushes and trays of blush. A guy in a black cocktail dress teetering precariously on the sill of an open window in a rear apartment (Room 410) of the Chelsea Hotel, screaming into the night. This was the scene at 2 a.m. on a Friday night in the spring of 1983 when my “lover” (as we called ourselves then), the film director Howard Brookner, and I threw the first of our preposterous Ladies’ Parties. Not only did we dress in wigs and dresses from 14th Street, but we took on personas to match. Howard was Lili LaLeen, a German film actress in a vintage Mary McFadden. Zipped into a distressed red velvet number, I was the wacky blonde June Buntt, who liked to say “the second T is silent.” I was married to the astronaut Brad Buntt, who liked to say he’d “been in space for years now.” The writer Dennis Cooper, in blue jean coveralls, was Mavis Purvis, a lesbian farmer living on a rural commune with her girlfriend. Poets ruled the evening — Tim Dlugos, still a few years from writing his haunting “G-9” poem about an AIDS ward, was Bernadette of Lourdes. The night was such a hoot we tried to reprise it a few times, but the tenor slid from hilarity to melodrama, and, like so many ecstasies of the era, soon just crumbled and fell apart.

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Hip-hop artist Prince Whipper Whip of the hip-hop group Grand Wizard Theodore & the Fantastic Five at the Sparkle in the Bronx. Photograph courtesy of Charlie Ahearn, whose groundbreaking hip-hop feature film “Wild Style” (1983) featured Grandmaster Flash, Lee Quiñones and Fab 5 Freddy, among others.Credit...Charlie Ahearn

My fantasy was to rent one of these theaters on 42nd Street and show my movie alongside Mad Monkey Kung Fu. To me it was all an art project. [Wild Style] opened in 1983, [at the Embassy 3] on 47th Street and Broadway. I’d paid high school kids to go on Thursday afternoons after school and hand out fliers. Everyone was very excited. There were lines around the block — the theater starting bumping it up to a second and third screening. This scrappy 16mm movie that people weren’t sure if it was a story movie or a documentary, everybody looked at it and said, “I know that guy!” They weren’t public figures; they were locally known graffiti artists, break-dancers, hip-hop M.C.s or D.J.s.

I felt like I was having the best entertainment of my life, because people were going up and down the aisle, going, “Loose joints …” People were talking throughout the whole movie going, “Yo, shut up!” It was just like the kung fu movies — they were the same audience. The weekend that it happened, I got a call at 2 o’clock in the morning from the owner of the theater. He goes, “What the hell are you doing to my theater? Someone broke the front glass and stole the poster. They put their names all over the men’s room!” The theater had been trashed. I said, “I’m very happy for you, you’re selling a lot of tickets. Sorry.”

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The bathroom of Area nightclub, which was located on 157 Hudson Street and opened in 1983.Credit...Maxi Cohen, Area, 1985, “Ladies’ Rooms Around The World”

I had a loft downtown on Walker Street, one of the first buildings that went on loft strike. We didn’t pay rent, but it was meant to be $300 a month. The landlord turned off the plumbing, so we’d defecate into garbage bags and throw them out the window. The first club I did with Shawn Hausman, The Club With No Name, was on 25th Street. After three, four months there, we decided to turn our loft into a nightclub. We blacked out the skylights and windows and painted most of it gold — very Warholian. We had a bar and some makeshift situation where people would collect the door charge, $5 or $10 maybe. Money was secondary to being able to have this playground we could create. We were such fashion victims. We’d spend hours getting our outfits together — buying stuff at Canal Plastics Center, stapling photo booth pictures onto our jackets. You couldn’t get people to go to a club before midnight. You wanted to be there when it was happening, and then you’d migrate at around 2:30 to an after-hours club. It was a small scene, people like writer Stephen Saban, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel [Basquiat] and Kenny Scharf. But, pre-AIDS anyway, it was also more diverse. It would be drag queens with punk kids, musicians and artists — everyone. The Mudd Club was right around the corner, going full throttle. There was a lot of crossover, because ours would go to 6 or 7 in the morning — some god-awful time. We’d go to bed among the broken glass, booze and old cigarettes.

Hear Eric Goode remember when he found out about AIDS:


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Ai Weiwei, Williamsburg, Brooklyn, 1983.Credit...Courtesy of Ai Weiwei Studio and Chambers Fine Art

I enrolled at the Parsons School of Design in 1982. My dormitory was at the corner of East 14th Street and Union Square. The room I shared with two other students was on the top floor of the building facing the park. Coming from China, I was eager to be accepted in this new environment, which felt like a monstrous machine — indifferent, its frenetic energy fueled by ambition. I did not know what my passions or imagination would lead to. I tried to focus on my art.

My sense of time was completely distorted. I had no reason to stay awake or to fall asleep. I slept when I was exhausted and awoke when I was refreshed. I existed like a soldier preparing for combat. But where was the battlefield?

I would often wake up in the middle of the night as the city slept. Separated from the commotion of the day, I would stretch my own canvases and start to paint in the dormitory’s common room. The quiet and space afforded clarity. My habit must have appeared bizarre to my peers. Pretty girls in pajamas peeked in on my occupied space. They would shy away with confused expressions, whispering to their friends. Others would drop by out of curiosity and wonder what was on my mind.

Honestly, my mind was empty, but I wanted to be consumed by that emptiness. I spent a decade in New York City like that.

I really had no business buying my loft on West Broadway in those years. I had the gallery in L.A., and I had just bought a house in Venice, so I was completely overextended, and it worried me. But I did it anyway. I just wanted to be in New York. It felt like there was all this dangerous energy. I started spending a third of my time there.

The loft was across the street from Castelli [Gallery]. It was raw: It had been a paper storage facility. I didn’t have the scratch to make it livable, but I met this guy named Peter Marino [the architect and designer] in the elevator who was doing a high-end renovation on the top floor and negotiated with him. He was in his preppy stage in those days, wearing button-downs, which really is hard to imagine now. I made a deal for him to do a cheapo job by trading a Brice Marden plus $10,000. I made sure there was a hot tub in there.

I did shows in there at night, including the first solo show David Salle ever had. We would go till 4 a.m. Hell, we would go past 4 a.m. There would be 200 people in there. You could say I was not a considerate neighbor.

I was still riding a little bit high off of the Diana Ross album “Diana,” which had come out in 1980. Even though every single record I’d put out up until then was gold, platinum or multiple platinum, “Diana” was the first time I’d ever worked with a big star. Everything was different for me. I met David Bowie in 1982 at the Continental on West 25th Street, which had just opened. I drove up in my Maserati Bora at around 5 o’clock in the morning and walked in with Billy Idol, who was a buddy of mine. And right away we see David Bowie, wearing a suit and sitting completely by himself in one of the hottest new clubs in the city. You’d think he would have been the most outrageous-looking person there, but he looked like a businessman. Everywhere else it was club kids and b-boys with foxtails hanging from their clothes; I had the shoulder pads and the spiky hair and all that. In retrospect, Bowie was ahead of the curve. Nobody was talking to him, probably because they didn’t recognize him. I went over and started chatting with him, and we became completely engrossed in this conversation about jazz. We did a deep dive into the most avant-garde, atonal jazz. I couldn’t believe he knew the same stuff I listened to as a kid in Greenwich Village. My parents were heroin addicts, beatniks. Thelonious Monk or Nina Simone or Gloria Lynne would stop by to visit them, so I grew up around these real bebop superstars. And Bowie had no idea that was my background. We were just taken with each other. Within a few days, he came to my apartment, which is how I wound up doing the arrangements for “Let’s Dance.”

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Pierre Francillon and Richard Alvarez, both artists and friends of fashion designer Andre Walker, in 1983 at the Middle Collegiate Church, where Walker held a fashion show.Credit...Andre Grossmann

When I was 15, I was in the clubs. I was sneaking out. I would get back home [from school] at a decent hour, four in the afternoon. By the time midnight came around and I knew my parents were sleeping, I would sneak out the window down onto the porch. I would be coming back around 4, 4:30, 5 o’clock — sometimes 6. It all depended on who was playing. Sometimes you would want to go to a Police concert, but you wouldn’t want to tell your friends, because they would be, like, “That’s so commercial and gross.” When it was the Dead Kennedys, Ari Up, The Slits, Public Image Ltd, you were all in full agreement. I never had to show the clothes I was making to a buyer, because they always saw it in the clubs first: at Danceteria, at Roxy, at Kool Lady Blue’s Friday-night party. That’s where I first met [the late street-style photographer] Bill Cunningham, I think. [The clothes] were really like one-plus-one, big squares with holes, basically. And then eventually some surface decoration with tucks and treatment — I’d take the fabric and just sew in any direction. The object was to keep stitching no matter what happened to the fabric. They were very basic but super interesting. Everything had my initials on it, or the name of somebody else on it; it was really crazy. I didn’t know what I was doing.

So we’re in this abandoned lot on a corner of 11th Avenue, somewhere in the high 40s or low 50s and not far from the old deserted elevated slate railroad that became the Highline. We’re shooting one of the final scenes in “Smithereens” where the main character, Paul, talks to a hooker in his graffiti-covered van — the film was very influenced by the graffiti art and punk scene of that time, particularly on the Lower East Side. It must have been late spring of 1981. We’d been working on the film for a year in dribs and drabs. Then our leading lady, Susan Berman, broke her leg, and we had to wait for her to get out of the cast. In the lot there are three vehicles. One is the van that we’re filming in — that’s our set but also a place to stay warm in between shots — one is a car for running errands and then there’s a truck, guarded by two Doberman pinschers, with all of our lighting and camera equipment. The area was really no-man’s land. There were still hookers, male and female, on the street, and vendors selling potted plants and gigantic stuffed animals under the rubble of the West Side Highway at all hours of the night. We didn’t bother to get any filming permits; the city was just coming out of its bankruptcy crisis, and I don’t even know if the mayor’s film office was up and running. (By the time we filmed “Desperately Seeking Susan” in ’84, New York was already beginning to become more gentrified.) If we got too cold or needed coffee, we would go over to 12th Avenue, where there were these old, sort of silver-clad Greek coffee shops that just don’t exist anymore. All of the cabbies would line up there to get eggs and bacon late at night. We’d bring the coffee back to the lot and keep filming. We finished that scene around 6 o’clock in the morning. Then we packed up our stuff, went back to the coffee shop to have breakfast and headed home.

In school, I never fit in at all. I didn’t want to fit in. I was living with my aunt and one of my cousins in a shotgun apartment in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I would go to school, come home, clean the house, babysit my second and third cousins, hang out on the stoop, wait for my aunt to come home, have dinner with her and wait until she fell asleep — then I broke out. I was straight-edge, so if I snuck out, I was all right, because I wasn’t hungover the next day like the other kids. But it did make me very, very moody — there were a lot of underground clubs, and they wouldn’t jump off till 1 a.m. I started going to local clubs in Brooklyn at about 14 years old. When I crossed the bridge, I had my “Saturday Night Fever” moment — the city was for the taking. By my late teens, people used to tell me, “You and you sister, it’s like it’s your job to go clubbing.” Maybe five nights a week I’d leave Brooklyn around 8:30 or 9 o’clock. I was part of the backpacker renaissance; you brought a backpack, so you’d have a change of clothes. Then we hit the clubs: Sound Factory, the Roxy, the Fun House. We liked to get there early, which the club promoters loved because we’d get the party started. Sometimes it was just me and my sister walking up to the velvet rope or the bouncers, or it would be a group of us, and they would let us right in. No ID check, nothing. Gay and straight people would party together. It wasn’t a big deal. I remember going to a gay club, and I totally bit their look: Daisy Duke shorts, combat boots and the half T-shirt — all I did was add fishnet stockings. When AIDS hit, the lines were drawn: You were either straight or gay. The straight clubs became very, very straight. It was hard. You would go up to the club and then you would look for a friend, like, “Where’s so-and-so?” “Oh, he got the thing; he got the sickness.” It would just ruin your night. I would stay in the clubs, but I wouldn’t dance. I would just sit there. Sometimes you would cry, but most of the time you were just stunned, like it wasn’t real. When the sun came up, we would get bagels or pretzels and get back on the train. If we weren’t in a group, I would walk over the bridge, because money was scarce and I wanted to have a token to go back out the next night. I got so tired of getting mugged on my way home. I never wore gold jewelry — I didn’t want to be a target. That’s why I started wearing silver hoop earrings. I saw Jody Watley on television, and I was like, “They don’t steal silver, I’m going to wear those!”

Hear Rosie Perez talk about her first time at CBGB:


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JAM gallery founder Linda Goode Bryant, circa 1981-82.Credit...Courtesy of Linda Goode Bryant

Six days a week I arrived every morning between 7:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. I had just moved the gallery to Franklin Street in TriBeCa from West 57th Street. I started JAM in 1974 to show the work of African-American artists and other artists of color. Galleries and museums didn’t exhibit their work at that time. A group of artists, friends and a few colleagues, including Marcia Tucker, the founder of the New Museum, demolished what remained of a former meatpacking company and converted it into JAM’s new space.

The gallery space was on the first floor; our offices were in the basement. This morning was no different than any other. I unlocked the door. But something wasn’t right. It was pitch-dark. I could feel the presence of someone in the room. I knew running back up the stairs was a bad idea. (“Never let on to a dog you’re afraid of him,” my Uncle Charlie would say.) So I flipped on the light and said, “Good Morning! How you doin’ this morning?”

He was young, dressed in jeans, and clearly shocked. He had intended whatever conversation we were having to go in another direction. “Aren’t the both of us up early,” I said. “It seems we could start later than this. Did you come to see the show? The gallery’s not open so you’ll have to come back. Can you come back later? It’s a great show.” We stared at each other for a moment. His shoulders dropped and he said, “Yeah.” We looked at each other again when I opened the door for him; we were each wondering what had just happened. “Hey,” I said. “Have a good day.” His hands were in his pockets now. He slowed and turned around: “Yeah, you too.”

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The artist David McDermott shot by his then-partner, the artist Peter McGough, East Village, 1983.Credit...Peter McGough

PM: We refused to take a job. We said we were artists, and artists make art. So we’d be starving. Sometimes I didn’t eat for two days. We were very, very thin. This was our morning ritual: We’d wake up, and if we had $5 on us we’d go to the 103 Restaurant on Second Avenue and Sixth Street. We could each get a full breakfast — scrambled eggs, hash browns, whole wheat toast with an endless cup of coffee — for $5 with tip. And if we didn’t have the money, we’d go to the maître d’ — it was absurd because this restaurant was in the middle of the slums — and say, “Can we pay you tomorrow?” and they’d let us. Or we’d go around to try to get breakfast from our friends, ringing doorbells to see who was up. They were more McDermott’s friends, because my friends were working in fashion and they were like, “Oh, get a job, bitch! Don’t come ringing my doorbell!” I remember we would go from person to person. We’d say, “They’re not up in the morning, so don’t go to them” or “They have kids, so maybe they’re up because the kids wake up.” We’d visit people in the morning, early. Nine o’clock was the earliest you could go. If they didn’t give us any food, we’d go off to the next person.

I had this idea I was going to be a writer; if I couldn’t, there would be no point to my life. I had reached 30 and was having to face how hard it was going to be. It was nothing but rejection. My life was spiraling downward. I was breaking up with somebody — a long, slow breakup. We had a studio on Bleecker near Seventh Avenue. I also had a tiny place on 12th Street between Greenwich and Washington — the top back room of a falling-apart townhouse that the owner was renting out. I would go there every day to write. By the end of the relationship, I was living there. It was all exposed wood and brick, and it had a tiny fireplace, a futon, my books, a sink and a stove. It had no closets, so somebody put up a bar so I could hang clothes. The rain came through, so the clothes were all messed up by brown streaks. I tried to write every single day, first thing in the morning, 10 a.m. Plodding. I would write longhand, sit down at the typewriter and type what I had, take those pages across the room to a different chair, sit down and work between the double spaces, do another draft. It was a kind of a monk’s cell. I had no student loans and the housing was still affordable. You could work, then not work for a while, get by. That’s what I did. I didn’t want anything to be more important than the writing.

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LaTanya Richardson Jackson (far right) in “Spell #7,” 1979.Credit...Martha Swope

Sam [Samuel L. Jackson] and I bought a brownstone in Harlem around 1981. I was doing commercials and Ntozake Shange’s “For Colored Girls” [“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf”] — I went on tour with that show, as part of the first national company. Sam was doing “Ragtime,” and then he did “A Soldier’s Play” on Broadway. So we were really supporting ourselves! There were so many actors who lived with us because we had five floors. There was always someone between apartments or someone coming to town who needed somewhere to stay. We had great people like Billy Nunn [Radio Raheem in Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”], Skeeter [Ellis Williams, who was in “The Pirates of Penzance” on Broadway]. Part of how they paid us was they had to strip some wood — the house had five fireplaces, and the foyer was original, and all wood. We’d go: “Look, even if you don’t know how to strip wood, we’re gonna show you: This gooey mess that you have to brush on the wood, wait till it bubbles, then you scrape it off.” Most mornings, we would wake up and check the answering machine. Somebody might have called during the night to say they might have job opportunities, so you always checked your machine. Then you would call at 10, or 10 after, to check in with your agent to see if there was anything going that day. You did a lot of the auditions immediately. Then you checked to see if there was anything in the theater papers for auditions. You were constantly on the phone: “Did you see this in the paper? Are you going to this?” It was make coffee, check in and then get busy stripping wood. There was a great camaraderie.

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Ann Magnuson performing at Kenny Scharf’s opening atop his “Ultima Suprema Deluxa” Cadillac on November 14, 1983.Credit...Allan Tannenbaum/Getty Images

My days changed depending on what show I was putting on, what sort of rehearsal schedule I had and how late I’d been up the night before, though I had a rule for myself: Always be back before sunrise. My primary motive back then was to put on a show, and anything that slowed me down from that had to be curtailed. By 1981, I was no longer the manager at [the East Village performance space] Club 57, but I still helped out and performed there a lot. The Ladies Auxiliary of the Lower East Side — sort of a punk rock version of my mother’s Junior League group, which I started with some other girls from the East Village — hosted several events at the club. We had a prom, a debutante ball, a ladies’ wrestling night. In 1981, I suggested a bacchanal — a night of pagan merriment as spring was coming. So in April we held the Rites of Spring Fertility Bacchanal. We made an altar to a llama, and everyone dressed in kind of Greco-Roman outfits — I wore a toga with sequins. Wendy Wild made magic mushroom punch. We also created a percussive orchestra that was all pots and pans and a lot of racket, and that was the debut of the band Pulsallama. It was really like a combination of living theater and installation art, very communal. That’s what happened at Club 57 a lot: We told people, “This is the theme. Come be a part of it.” The doors would open and things would get going by 10, and by midnight it would be raging. In the mornings, usually around 11 a.m., I’d go to one of the coffee shops around the corner on Avenue A. Odessa was one, and Leshko’s was the other. People divided themselves into camps based on which one they favored — I liked Odessa better, but I’d go to both. That’s where you’d run into people, share breakfast.

When “Flashdance” came out in 1983, Paramount put me up in the Carlyle Hotel to do promotion. It was an incredible contrast from the last time I had lived in New York, when I was 17, during the summer of 1981, in a $500-a-month sublet loft that my boyfriend and I had found paging through our bible, the call to another life — The Village Voice — in his basement in Evanston. I remember I was drawn to the ad for the loft because it was in a place that sounded like “trifecta”; my father had taken me to the track, so that seemed comforting and familiar. (What a loft was, I wasn’t entirely sure.) Being at the Carlyle was amazing, but I was still an undergrad at Yale at the time, and the whole thing felt unreal, as though I was living two lives. One day, I was walking uptown to an appointment just before noon, and coming toward me was Robert Duvall. He recognized me and stopped to congratulate me on the film. It was crazy. He said he was going to lunch with some friends, and did I want to join? I couldn’t, but I did turn around and walk with him for some blocks to the restaurant. It was a brilliantly sunny day, and standing outside was Dustin Hoffman. Bob introduced us, and Dustin congratulated me on the film and told me my acting was “naturalistic.” It dawned on me that there are so many different styles of acting and you don’t have to adhere to just one. I was 19. I didn’t know anything. That completely opened my mind.

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The painter David Salle in his Manhattan studio, 1983.Credit...Thomas Hoepker/Magnum Photos

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1980 is sometimes used as a marker of the beginning of the end of the art world as it was then known, as if the two were somehow related, as if an election ushered in some new aesthetic permission, a new vulgarity, which is really a kind of negative magical thinking. I doubt if many artists experienced it that way. Everyone I knew hated Reagan and couldn’t wait for him to get out of office. I remember being in someone’s loft — it might have been [artist] Brian Hunt’s — with a group of friends, watching the inauguration on a little black-and-white television. The silence, as they say, was deafening. No one could believe that this B-actor was about to occupy the White House.

I got up at anywhere from 3 to 5 in the morning and worked as long as I could. I worked in my office at home, an eight-room walk-up on the Upper West Side. It was a very different kind of neighborhood from the one I grew up in in Harlem — just starting to be gentrified. The apartment was big, but the hall was in very bad repair, or at least looked it. “Mom says that your apartment looks like a crack den,” my daughter told me once. A “crack den” lined with books.

At 11 to 12, I’d had a nine-hour day. I would walk around the neighborhood, go down to 42nd Street and do a lot of movie cruising. I’d go for two, three, four hours and have a fairly good time. There was a theater called the Capri that I went to a lot. There were others: the Venus, and down in the 14th Street area, the Variety Photoplays, a Spanish one called The Jefferson, The Metropol [Metropolitan]. Some of them were open 24 hours a day, or they were closed maybe four hours a day for cleaning. They were relatively small, rundown theaters; they tended to have a fair amount of drug use going on. A lot of it was crack. Before that it had been pot. These places were used largely by working-class men, white, black and Latino, people who thought of themselves as straight and gay, many of whom were amenable to sexual things. They could be stimulated by the heterosexual pornography that was on the screen. This kind of activity is highly socially ordered: You don’t barge in on other people, that’s all part of it. I tended to feel particularly safe in the theaters. AIDS was a very strange situation; starting in ’82 you knew very little about it, and then a few years later you suddenly realized it was the largest killer among your personal friends. It cut down a great number of the people who were out there doing it, but at the same time, the ones who were left were much more intense about it. You weren’t afraid of getting it, you were wondering when are the symptoms going to show up.

I held auditions for “Fame,” the TV show, on a Sunday at the New York School of Ballet because that’s where I trained, and Mr. Thomas [ballet dancer Richard Scott Thomas] was happy to give me a studio. I had been starring on Broadway in “West Side Story,” and I had done the movie “Ragtime,” which was also coming out, but dance has always been my heartbeat. So when they talked to me about playing the character Lydia Grant, the dance teacher, I said, “Yes, I would be so interested if I could also be responsible for the choreography.” Because by this time, I had been developing as a choreographer, working with the Henry Street Playhouse and the New York Shakespeare Festival, and I really loved doing it. And they said, “Yeah, you can have that” — they weren’t even thinking about it. They paid me like a tenth of what they paid me to do the acting, and it became my whole life. We were shooting the pilot, and I was trying to find the best dancers I could. They were supposed to be 17 or 18. Some of them were lying about their age and I knew it, but I didn’t care. I said, “To hell with it!” Jasmine Guy auditioned; she wasn’t of age yet. Bronwyn Thomas, she was like happy feet on her toes. She was the ultimate ballerina, and she became that on “Fame.” I was excited that I would be able to introduce this new band of gypsies to the Hollywood scene.

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An unpublished male nude Polaroid from 1981 by photographer Tom Bianchi.Credit...Tom Bianchi

Columbia Pictures had given me this SX-70 camera at a conference, and I started documenting life in the Fire Island Pines [an area of Long Island known as a haven for gay life], which just seemed very important to me. Growing up in the suburbs of Chicago, a boy like me didn’t know there was a place for him in the world like that. Very quickly, I realized it had potential to be a book. Two editors at Simon & Schuster thought it was terrific, but they said, “You have to produce this yourself, and we can possibly get you a distribution deal. We can’t put the money out for something this queer.” Then [writer and editor] Bob Colacello saw the project and said, “Andy Warhol has a three-book deal with Houghton Mifflin. He has one book but he doesn’t have the next two. Maybe he could do your book under that contract.” So I went to the Factory and stood at a tall table with Andy and Bob, and Andy went through the dummy. It was almost a surreal experience, because I had the feeling that this person is only vaguely here. As Andy turned the pages, he said things like “Oh, that’s nice,” “Oh, that could be larger,” “Oh … ” At the end of it, he said, “Yes, I think we should do your book. I’ve gotta go to something, Bob will call you.” I took the elevator down to the street and I saw a phone booth and the first thought that came to my mind was, “Do not call any of your friends and tell them Andy Warhol is doing your book because I don’t think that’s for real.” And sure enough, he didn’t.

I met Kim [Gordon] through a mutual friend. Her upstairs neighbor was artist Dan Graham, who I knew through the artist-poet Vito Acconci. It was all very small town-y. She knew I was in dire straits; [by 1979] my landlord was getting squirrelly. We decided to live together at her place, 84 Eldridge Street. It had a tub in the kitchen, a tiny little toilet bowl in a closet of a room, one narrow hallway room and a slightly bigger front room — maybe $210.

In ’80, I got a job at Todd’s Copy on Mott Street. Todd Jorgensen ran the Xerox machine in Jamie Canvas, the art supply store in SoHo everybody went to. It was the only Xerox machine below 14th Street, so every artist used it. As soon as he opened [his own place] I started working there, alongside Sara Driver [the filmmaker and partner of Jim Jarmusch]. It was sort of 11 to 7. [Kim] would work one day, and I’d work the next. It was a total nexus. You’d establish dialogue with great artists like Lawrence Weiner. People like Jean-Michel [Basquiat] would come in, who was somebody you knew from Tier 3 and the Mudd Club; someone your age. I was like, “Oh cool, you’re doing art too?” Bands would put up fliers all over SoHo; there were wheat-paste fliers everywhere.

I decided to start a music fanzine around ’82; I called it “Killer.” When Todd wasn’t looking, I’d be running off copies and stapling them together. Michael Gira, the frontman of the band Swans, was on the [first] cover. Todd didn’t like the idea that I was doing a fanzine. He was very aware I was using a lot of paper that wasn’t being accounted for, so we came to an agreement that I had to pay.

I got my first loft in what was called Lower Manhattan before it was renamed the Triangle Below Canal, which was the realtors’ term that became TriBeCa, in 1967. There were very few artists there. I moved to Leonard Street and stayed there until five or six years ago when I was made to leave my rented loft.

My first photo lab was called Hy Photo. They were on 51st or 52nd between Fifth and Madison. I would take my work from that lab — it was already mounted with dimensions like 48 by 72 inches, 40 by 60 inches — carry it to the E train, down the stairs, then get off at Canal and carry it down to Leonard and up my four flights of stairs. It was a walk-up. They had done mostly commercial work, and I had to explain to them that this is different than their commercial stuff — to take a different kind of care. And I’m not a corporate client, so please give me a break. I couldn’t work in color because I couldn’t afford to make color prints.

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Steve Landis’s photograph for fashion designer Norma Kamali’s 1981 Sweats campaign. Landis shot the models one afternoon on the Upper East Side. Kamali’s clothes cleverly combined athletic wear and fabric with high-fashion cuts and silhouettes, perfectly embodying the era.Credit...© 1981, Steve Landis

To me, the 1980s were incredibly liberating. I found them very original, underivative of the ’60s or ’70s — they had a cleanness and a strength to them. I’d been divorced and on my own since 1977 — I had started the business with my husband a decade earlier — and it felt like women were waking up. There was an interest beyond becoming “ladies who lunch.” Everyone talks about the 1970s as being the birth of feminism, but for me, the ’80s were really about feminism in practical use. The silhouette I was doing — broad shoulders and thin hip — was my way of reinterpreting masculine power, but with humor.

In the early ’80s, I had a great loft in the meatpacking district, which at that point was full of meat hanging on hooks and blood running in the streets. Jane Fonda had recently released her workout tapes, and it was the first opportunity a lot of women had to exercise. I committed the tapes to memory; I would do them over and over. There were very few places to work out back then. I liked to work out in the late afternoon, because in the morning I wanted to save every iota of energy for my work and the store. I would go to these obscure classes around the city that were mostly for dancers. There was a studio near First Avenue in the 50s that used a dance technique that was a modified version of Pilates. I was eating very healthfully, which wasn’t easy then, seeking out the few macrobiotic restaurants there were. People thought I was a little crazy.

We used to have a TV with a VCR on at all times, playing MTV and the guys coming up. All the music [in the atelier on 125th Street] came from the VCR. People would bring me their videos to pop in. They’d say, “Yo, Dap, listen to that.” All the hip-hop artists came [to the atelier]; there wasn’t any other place that catered to rappers. Those who set the tone — you had to have an outfit from me. Rapping and fashion were being born at the same time. One time a girl — a teenager, maybe 15, 16 — came in with her dad. She had made a video of herself dancing to LL Cool J. Her father said, “Dap, my daughter, she’s driving me crazy. Could you just call LL so she could just say hi?” Everybody knew I knew all the rappers and everything. So I call LL up and I let her speak to him for a few minutes. And when she gave me the phone back, she went into [hysterics]. LL wasn’t used to this kind of attention. He said, “Dap, what’s she doing?” I said, “She’s gasping for air now!” And I go attend to her. And then he asked me again: “Dap, what’s she doing? What’s she doing now?” She was like [hyperventilating]. I never saw that before — and he’d never experienced that. It was before he was onstage and all that; he was just starting out.

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The artists Laurie Simmons and Carroll Dunham at their wedding, 1983.Credit...Eliza Hicks

There was a thing I did every Friday night because my boyfriend [now husband, artist Carroll Dunham] worked at Time magazine, so I wasn’t out looking for guys. I would go to this rotary sushi place called Genroku. This was every Friday. It was on 35th and Fifth, and it was a place where the sushi came around on a conveyor belt. I had gone to a place when I was a kid called Hamburger Express, and the hamburgers used to come around on a little choo-choo train. And I just loved that experience. I loved things coming around and you had to grab them, like getting your luggage off a luggage rack. And the food at Genroku was really cheap, which was the operative word. Then I would go to Macy’s and go to the $10 rack. There would be all of the amazing designer clothes that nobody wanted, that were too weird. I would then either go to work or go to an opening because Macy’s closed at 8:45 or something, so you had to move on. But this was every week. And if I missed it, I felt really bad.

I had to be at the theater by 7 o’clock so I could start my process and get ready before half-hour call. You’d get into costume, put makeup on, make sure your props were in the right place, talk to the stage manager. Talk to the actors as they drifted in about your day, talk about who’s auditioning for what. I was doing “A Soldier’s Play” with the Negro Ensemble Company, working with Denzel [Washington], Adolph Caesar, Larry Riley, James Pickens, Brent Jennings, Cotter Smith. Adolph would regale us with stories. He was the voice of every commercial on the radio or television at that time, and the richest among us. Denzel had just gotten “St. Elsewhere,” so he was going back and forth between doing the TV show and the play. Everybody was happy for him and saying, “O.K., it’s possible, we’re in the right place, we’re doing the right thing.”

I remember the first time we went in and read “A Soldier’s Play” out loud, we were all just staring at each other going, “Oh my god, this is amazing.” Two days later, Adolph came in, threw his script down, and said, “I’m ready!” And we all looked at him like, “Okay, fine!” So we all threw our scripts down, too, because everybody had learned the play in like two days. Two weeks later we were begging to let people come watch us rehearse. And the director, Charles Fuller, was like, “No, you’re not really ready — you just think you are!” Everybody was anxious to do it for an audience, so by the time we opened, it was amazing. It was packed every night; it won the Pulitzer Prize that year. Then there were the rumors that they were going to make a movie of the play, and naturally we all thought, “Oh my god, we’re gonna be in a movie!” But when the time came to make that movie, they only took Denzel, Larry, and Adolph. And the rest of us were kinda like, “Oh man, what? What the hell?”

I was living at almost the exact point where the Village meets the East Village, in the Colonnade Row building, right across the street from the Public Theater. I had half of the third floor, which was sort of the high-ceilinged fancy room, though it had long, long since stopped being fancy. My contemporary, the writer Ed [Edmund] White, had the apartment next door. I could wake up in the middle of the night and hear his typewriter going.

I met Peter Hujar through Susan Sontag. We became sort of like brothers. I’m a child of the Midwestern upper-middle class. Peter was straight out of Damon Runyon and Weegee. We were both rather exotic in each other’s eyes. Peter lived on the absolute margins — he never had anything. I remember thinking, How long can this go on? Peter can’t keep going that way, not in the city that it’s becoming now. Peter was so self-possessed and dignified, I never, ever thought of him as poor, even though he had no money. He’d walk in and be perfectly comfortable with the Duke of Edinburgh.

I invited him to dinner. The conversation was very interesting. Peter had no small talk at all. Then it got to be a habit. He’d come around maybe at 7 o’clock. We’d eat. I would drink quite a lot of wine. He would maybe drink half a glass of wine. Having had an alcoholic mother, he did not like being around people who drank much. We would sit at this coffee table and listen to records for an hour. Silently. Or with only a few comments in between. That is something I have never done with anyone else. Patsy Cline. Mozart. One of his favorite pieces was the Alto Rhapsody of Brahms, sung by Dame Janet Baker. Sometimes I would read him the week’s work. He had two responses: “Pretty good,” was high, high praise. The other was he wouldn’t say anything, just [shrug] — that meant it was a failure.

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The writer Gay Talese’s social calendar for October 1983.Credit...Weichia Huang

Between 1981 and 1983 I was commuting between New York and a rented apartment in Rome, researching a book about my Italian ancestry that would be called “Unto the Sons.” My wife, Nan, would visit me in Italy as often as she could, but always briefly. She was very busy editing books of her own, among them “Jane Fonda’s Workout Book,” Thomas Keneally’s “Schindler’s List,” Margaret Atwood’s “Bluebeard’s Egg” and Rosalynn Carter’s memoir “First Lady From Plains.” At one point Nan traveled to the Carters’ home in Plains, Georgia, an ordinary split-level with an imperial iron fence that had been Richard Nixon’s from Key Biscayne (the Carters didn’t believe in waste). In a letter about her trip, she wrote, “When pages needed to be retyped, Jimmy did the retyping. Once he came in and told us that something his wife had written was in error and she replied, ‘Jimmy, you wrote your book. Now let me write mine.’ ” In October of that year, when I was back in New York, the Carters visited the city and Nan invited them to dine with us at Elaine’s [restaurant]. We went from our home in the East 60s, with Jimmy Carter and me in one car (driven by a member of the Secret Service) and Nan and Rosalynn in another. I was worried about how the crowd there would receive the Carters. Jimmy Carter’s reputation was tarnished by the hostage crisis in Iran, and I feared that perhaps Norman Mailer, an Elaine’s regular, or some very politically active and argumentative individual, might stop by our table to express some unfavorable comments. But as soon as we walked in, nearly everyone stood and applauded. We were then escorted to a quiet table in the rear by the smiling proprietress herself, Ms. Elaine Kaufman, and joined by her good friend, the gregarious publicist Bobby Zarem, a city slicker born in Savannah, Georgia, who told Mr. Carter: “Your brother Billy once called me a ‘Yankee’ because Savannah is north of Plains.” Norman Mailer wasn’t there that night.

Ever since I moved out of my parents’ house in Astoria to live in the city, I’ve always lived within the same two or three blocks of the Upper West Side. In 1981, I lived on 79th and West End; it was tiny but very comfortable. I’ve always been a pretty good cook, and I could make these very good dinners in this tiny kitchen. The Upper West Side has always been a great place to buy food, with terrific places for fish and vegetables. The apartment had this old refrigerator that didn’t have room for much, so in the winter I’d keep everything out on the fire escape. There was a place called Columbus, on Columbus Avenue and 69th Street. It was a restaurant — a modest place, like an Italian restaurant — but really it was an actor’s hangout. You’d walk in there and all the actors would be sitting around, it was almost like a club, and you’d see all these people: Danny Aiello, Warren Beatty. And then there were athletes and New York characters — a bunch of people who I didn’t know what they did, I just knew I saw them all the time. At night, if I was sitting around and wanted to amuse myself, I’d walk down to Columbus and say hello.

Hear Christopher Walken talk about seeing movies — during the day:

One evening Kenny Scharf and his whole group — which included Jean-Michel Basquiat, and certainly Keith Haring — were hanging out at the artists’ studios at the Clocktower Gallery [in the former New York Life Insurance Company Building at Leonard Street and Broadway]. They had gotten the idea that it was a very good headquarters. It was on the 13th floor of an old city building, and you had to walk up a whole floor from the 12th, which was the last floor served by an elevator. Certainly at night, few people were there, and few were there on the weekends. So the artists would often have free rein, and would sometimes sneak up to the roof, especially for the Fourth of July and other events like that.

Then, I didn’t have the kind of formal board that one would today. It was chaired by Brendan Gill, a great theater critic and architecture writer. And we had Tina Chow, who had such unearthly beauty — she would come into a room and just drift. Then we had Woody Allen. The deal with him was he never had to come and he never had to give any money, but he would give his name and a recommendation. And then we had Robert Rauschenberg, a rascal and a great man.

One night, one horrible July Fourth, I invited the board members up to the roof, and I discovered 40 or 50 people at a party that I think Kenny had organized. They were all drunk and wasted and they were happy. And they were there illegally. It was just shattering, but of course I had to pretend that this was the surprise that I had brought my board to see.

In the summer of 1981 I was living with Gary Fisketjon, my best friend from college and my future editor at Random House. I was staying in Gary’s loft on East Fifth Street between Bowery and Second, on summer break from the writing program at Syracuse, where I’d been studying with Raymond Carver and Tobias Wolff. We were in the habit of throwing parties on Saturday nights. On July 11, the guests included novelists Harold Brodkey, Mona Simpson, Richard Price and Scott Sommer (who might be better known if he hadn’t died at 42). Carver came by, down from Syracuse on some publishing business. Jean-Michel Basquiat wandered in at some point — a neighbor with whom we had a nodding acquaintance. We never served any food, but we always had a couple cases of beer and a basic bar. We always had coke, and many guests brought their own. We blasted Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, Joe Jackson. I remember this night in particular because of another guest, Jack Henry Abbott, who was living in a halfway house a couple blocks away. He’d just been released from prison, and his prison memoir, “In the Belly of the Beast,” had been published that week. He was with his editor Erroll McDonald, a good friend of ours, but he refused to come into the room, remaining near the door with his back against the wall. These parties inevitably blur together in my mind, but I remember that night because a week later, Abbott stabbed and killed a waiter at the Binibon cafe, a few doors down the block.

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The original flier for Kelly’s show at the Pyramid Club in 1981.Credit...Courtesy of John Kelly, photograph by John Dugdale

My first loss was my partner, around the time Grace Kelly died in 1982. I made a short performance called “Life Without Grace,” a kind of eulogy. The title was an intentional lure — the work wasn’t about Grace Kelly, but the painter William Schwedler. When he got sick, we were in a downward spiral for a year and a half. (How many spinal taps can you give to someone under a refrigeration blanket whose fever wouldn’t break?) I don’t even know if it was named AIDS at that point. There were all these conspiracy theories. People would drop change in your hands, turn their heads when you tried to kiss them. We didn’t know how the virus transmitted. You’d see people that you hadn’t seen in months in the street with KS [Kaposi’s sarcoma] lesions; people would just disappear. “Where’s Joe?” Eventually you’d realize that he died, and his family came and put his artwork in a dumpster. Or his family didn’t come, and the landlord put his work in a dumpster.

When you’re at a memorial mourning the passing of a friend or a lover and they’re really young, where do you put that stuff? One of my responses was to just keep working. I chose a very mournful, elegiac, orchestral piece of music, and I created a gray-scale portrait of three heads: Bill’s head in the middle, and my two profile heads coming out of either side of his. It was [at the Pyramid Club] just one night, October of 1982, before the floodgates opened. It was a very quiet audience. I went from area to area of the performance space, onstage and offstage. It was totally improvised, like a live prayer: “Do you know that people are dying?”

Hear John Kelly describe ’80s style:

Nancy Hass is the writer at large for T Magazine. More about Nancy Hass

M.H. Miller is the arts editor of T Magazine. More about M.H. Miller

Kate Guadagnino is a staff editor for T Magazine. More about Kate Guadagnino

Thessaly La Force is the features director of T Magazine. More about Thessaly La Force

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 68 of T Magazine with the headline: 24 Hours In The Life Of The City. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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