Thistle Hill Tavern, Friendly Operators and a Spotlight on Bartenders

The NYN Nightlife Report for 5.27.2010
Compiled by Gamal Hennessy

…I hunt down the nightlife news so you don’t have to…

Opening
Thistle Hill Tavern
(Zagat)
A laid back bar in Park Slope offers you an alternative to the summer beer garden

Community Issues
Operators trying to work with residents
(EV Grieve)
There are many stories of NIMBY residents using the influence of the community board to shut down a venue. In an attempt to avoid this problem, some operators are reaching out to residents in an effort to eliminate problems or alter the perceptions of residents who live close to the bars. Some have offered ways to deal with the noise. Others have art shows. Some just make themselves available to listen to residents concerns. This kind of work might not be visible to the patrons or to a venues bottom line, but it can have a real impact on the ability of a spot to keep its liquor license.

Operators
Bartenders vs. Managers
(Bar Business Magazine)
You and your co-workers head to a bar after work to complain about your boss. It might help you to know that the guys and girls behind the bar not only offer you an escape from your misery, they feel your pain. In this article, industry veteran Bob Johnson offers a laundry list of complaints that bartenders have about their bosses.

Profiles
Doug Quinn
(New York Times)
If a venue has a good bartender, patrons come back you that bar for years. He knows what he’s doing, she knows what you like, they make you feel comfortable as you slip into intoxication. The inaugural drinking column in the New York Times focuses on Doug Quinn, the head bartender at P.J. Clarke’s who has been described as “a bartender’s bartender.” My only gripe about this column is that I think I should be writing it, but that’s another story…

Have fun.
Gamal

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The 10 Best Websites for New York Nightlife

By Gamal Hennessy

“Where do you want to go tonight?”

How many times has someone asked you this question when its time to go out at night? How often do you just shrug your shoulders and say “I don’t know, where do you want to go?” This is not a stimulating conversation. Luckily this is completely avoidable in the modern age of nightlife. The days when you found out about an event or a new venue from a flyer, the radio or word of mouth are long gone. New York nightlife has dozens of sites to help you navigate bars, parties and “secret spots that nobody knows about.” Since you don’t have the time or the patience to sift through hundreds of sites, here are 10 good ones to get you up off the couch and into the night.*

I’ve divided the top 10 into three categories. Venue sites help you find a particular kind of place based on your preferences. Event sites help you find a particular kind of party in the near future. Finally, New Venue sites help you stay up to date with the constantly changing nightlife environment.

Venue Sites
1. Blackbook has a detailed database searchable by part of town, type of crowd, price, features and vibe. It also has direct links to Good Night Mr. Lewis, giving you a chance to go beyond the specific venue and get the insight of an operator who was there when venues like the Limelight and Studio 54 were at their height.
2. Club Planet: has searchable database that allows you to search by neighborhood, venue type, music type and “begins with” for those cool spots you went to before and would have remembered if you weren’t so drunk. There is also a list of events and a guest list feature that has worked reasonably well in the past.
3. New York Magazine: Bars is a database searchable by neighborhood and feature. The nightlife homepage makes it easy to find newest venues and most searchable spots if you want to go where everyone else is going. New York Magazine is also connected to Grub Street, which can offer you some additional insight on changes in the industry as they happen.
4. Shecky’s: has a nightlife guide searchable by neighborhood and type, with dozens of different types of spots laid out for you at the bottom of the page. While the writing is geared towards the Sex and the City crowd, men shouldn’t avoid using this site. We want to go where the girls go, so if this site is telling them where to go, then it’s telling us where to go too.

Event Sites
5. Facebook (C’mon, Do you really need a link to FB?): The good news about using FB to decide where to go is that you can find events your real friends are having or going to and you can invite your other friends seamlessly. The bad news is that if you live in NYC then you probably get 6-12 random invitations a day from promoters you have never met, for events that you have no intention of going to, that are going to be overbooked so you couldn’t get into them anyway. Stick to your actual friend and FB can be an event gold mine.
6. Going: reference to specific events, searchable by night of the week, types of event. While it isn’t very easy to navigate, it does have a wide range of venues and events for those who don’t want to go to the same places with the same people all the time.
7. Guest of a Guest: The event calendar on GofG lists events by the hour, so you can bar hop in style. But be warned, the listings are not exclusively for club events (they mix in book signings, fashion shows, charity events and other types of parties) and they often list events that you or I can’t get into without a prior invitation. Sometimes I feel like they aren’t listing the event so you can go. They’re listing events to show you what you’re missing.

New Venue Sites
8. Thrillist: might only have one nightlife listing per week, but it is probably going to give you info on the venue of the moment. You can sign up for their newsletter and always know what is opening up whether it’s a beer garden in Brooklyn or a rooftop in Midtown.
9. Urban Daddy: is like Thrillist’s rich cousin. It offers weekly listings of the newest venues (among its fashion, leisure and food reviews) as they open but it serves an older, more affluent crowd. If Thrillist wears a graphic tee and skinny jeans, Urban Daddy has an Armani suit with a pocket square.
10. Eater: tracks venues as they open, but the site goes farther than other sites in this category for two reasons. First, they go behind the scenes of the process of opening a venue, showing the development of the space, liquor license updates and struggles with the community boards. Second, they also let you know which venues have closed so you don’t bring your friends out to your favorite spot on a Friday night only to find out that its been shut down for weeks.

Picking a site (or sites) from this list is mostly a matter or personal taste. If you like Blackbook you might not need New York. If you’re happy with Thrillist, Urban Daddy might be redundant. You don’t have to visit all of them to find somewhere to go but spending a little time with at least one of them can make a night on the town much less confusing and much more pleasurable. And in the end, that is the point.

Have fun.
G

P.S. You will not that I didn’t list New York Nights as one of the best sites for New York nightlife. That is not a function of false modesty. If you’re reading this, you already know what NYN is about. You know what it offers and you already know that all the sites listed here have links on our homepage. The sites listed here offer something that we don’t and we offer something that they don’t. Your best bet is to visit them and us to get a more complete picture of the nightlife you live in.

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You Should Be Dancing (New York City and the Cabaret Law)

By Gamal Hennessy

This Saturday marks the fourth annual New York Dance Parade. The festival is a celebration of all forms of dance, the cultures that shape them, and contributions they make to the diversity of New York City. It is also a grass roots attempt to expose the double standards that nightlife faces, specifically the law that makes it illegal to dance in most New York clubs.

History
Since the 1926, there has been a New York City law that makes it illegal for a bar or club to have more than a few people dancing to music unless it had specific permission, in the form of a cabaret license, for that activity. The reasoning for this law comes from the social and political climate of the era. The 1920’s saw a rise in the then perceived evils of women’s liberation and interracial dating. Jazz clubs were seen as a flashpoint for these trends. The law gave City Hall the tools to shut down the venues that promoted behavior they didn’t like. Luckily, the law didn’t stop the flourishing of jazz, greater rights and independence for women or interracial dating, but it stayed on the books for almost 80 years before it was enforced again.

“Quality of Life”
The Giuliani administration began to use the law to shut down clubs under the pretense of avoiding disasters like the Happy Land Social Club fire. His real aim was to shut venues that didn’t conform to his “quality of life” crusade. As it always does, the nightlife industry found creative ways to get around the law and keep butts moving. Venues used lookouts, warning lights and DJ’s would instantly switch from dance music to soft rock whenever the ‘dance police’ were spotted in the area.

Depending on whom you ask, when Bloomberg came into office he either tried to repeal the cabaret laws or use it to permanently roll back the closing time of New York nightlife from 4 AM to 1 AM. Nightlife advocates, who lobbied for several years to have the law taken off the books, rejected the 2004 proposal because of the connection between dancing and closing times. A subsequent legal challenge by grass roots organizations including the Dance Parade and Metropolis in Motion failed when a judge ruled that nightlife dancing is not protected form of speech under the 1st Amendment. The law currently remains in place. Out of the 1,100 nightlife spots in New York, only 200 currently have a cabaret license.

Impact
The cabaret law is a prime example of attacking culture and expression in the name of public safety. By forcing operators to acquire a license for dancing, we have created a system that economically punishes venues that comply by forcing them to compete with venues that ignore the law. But a more basic point is the irrationality of the basic law. It is arbitrary and nonsensical to conclude that music is a protected art form, but dancing is not protected. The two art forms go together. It is hypocritical and pretentious to see ballet and ballroom dancing as high art but reject salsa and break dancing as artless. It is repressive and inhumane to require a license for something as fundamental as the expressive movement of the human body.

There are issues of overcrowding, ventilation, emergency exits and other security measures in certain clubs, but prohibiting dance doesn’t solve any of these problems. People can be packed into a bar tighter than a rush hour subway without any dancing taking place. If you try to stop people from dancing, you will not stop overcrowding. You will not make anyone safer. You won’t even stop people from dancing. The only goal that can be reached by forcing a cabaret license on us is undermining one of the pillars that make New York a world class city.

Societe Perrier ran a story earlier this week about the Dance Parade where they stated “Dance is vital in healthy societies, helping people to communicate and affirm individual and collective identity.” In other words, it is a necessary element of who we are. The Mayor, the Governor and a U.S. Senator from New York have all publicly endorsed the Dance Parade as a positive expression of New York culture. At what point will they back up those statements with changes in the law that protect and support a form of art we can all participate in?

Have fun.
Gamal

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Cienfuegos, Glass Bar, and the Dance Parade

The Nightlife Report for May 19, 2010
Compiled by Gamal Hennessy

…I hunt down the nightlife news so you don’t have to…

Opening
Glass Bar (Hotel Indigo)
(Urban Daddy)
The rooftop bar in a hotel is a default location for the summer, but on the cold, rainy days we’ve been faced with lately it doesn’t seem like a good place to go. Several bars, including the new Glass bar in the Hotel Indigo are solving this problem by offering a roof to protect your drink from the elements. While some venues go for the retractable roof option, Glass Bar has specific sections covered to protect you from the rain. The roof might not protect you from the chill, but that’s what liquor and the body heat of an attractive crowd is for…

Cienfuegos
(Black Book)
New York’s cocktail renaissance continues with a new bar in Alphabet City. This time the operators who brought you gems like Death & Co., Flatiron Lounge and the tequila shrine Mayahuel bring you a speakeasy dedicated to rum. It’s just in time for a summer of coladas…

Government
SLA Rolls Back Emergency License Procedures
(New York Times)
It appears that the crisis in liquor licensing is over. Last year, the New York State Liquor Authority went through a series of upheavals including corruption charges, a change in leadership and a backlog of liquor licenses that numbered in the thousands. Denis Rosen, the new head of the SLA, attempted to solve the backlog problem by creating a streamlined process for licenses that reduced the waiting time from 8 months to 5 weeks. That change in procedure virtually eliminated the back log in a matter of months. Now that the license process is less problematic, the SLA is going back to the normal licensing regime. This move will appease several groups, including local community boards who felt some of their influence eroded by the fast track licensing plan. Hopefully, the SLA will be able to handle the other issues facing it with the same insight and agility it showed in the licensing crisis.

Events

Dance Parade (May 22, 2010)
(Societe Perrier)
This Saturday marks the fourth annual New York Dance Parade. The festival is a celebration of all forms of dance, the cultures that shape them, and contributions they make to the diversity of New York City. It is also a grass roots attempt to expose the double standards that nightlife faces, specifically the law that makes it illegal to dance in most New York clubs. The fact that we have a celebration of the different forms of dance that have originated or thrived in New York nightlife (hip hop, vogue, jazz, salsa, etc) is commendable. The fact that New York State doesn’t recognize dance as an art form the way it recognizes music, theater and painting as art is sad. The Dance Parade is an effort to change the way dance is perceived in New York in the same way that New York Nights is an effort to change the way nightlife is perceived in New York. Both causes deserve your support.

Have fun.
G

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Kastel, Limelight, M2 and Sex Parties

The Nightlife Report for May 6, 2010
Compiled by Gamal Hennessy

...I hunt down the nightlife news so you don't have to...

Opening
Kastel
(Black Book)
The Trump SoHo opens a spot looking to dominate the post dinner/ pre-club niche downtown.

Closed
M2
(Eater)
The previous closure of the West Chelsea staple becomes a little more permanent as the SLA revokes the venues liquor license.

Sexuality
Behind Closed Doors
(News Blaze)
Nightlife is a sexual metaphor, but the organizers of the BCD events are looking to skip over the metaphor and get straight to the sex part with carefully screened couples and single girls attending their “Swing School”

Tragedy
Limelight Marketplace
(Urban Daddy)
Those who spent many nights and days dancing, drinking and debasing themselves in the Limelight (and later Avalon) might not want to read the rest of this; Limelight is now a shopping mall.

Have fun.
Gamal

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Marc Berkley, Alejandro Flores and Laura Garza

The New York Nights Nightlife Report for May 2, 2010
Compiled by Gamal Hennessy

…I hunt down the nightlife news so you don’t have to…

New York Nights is preempting its normal nightlife coverage to mark the passing of three people who, each in their own way, impacted the nightlife industry and culture. We will resume our regular coverage next week.

Obituaries
Marc Berkley
(1954-2010)
Marc Berkley was an influential promoter, publisher and gay activist. During his career he created long running events at iconic venues including Saint, Limelight, and the Roxy. He founded HX and Empire magazines, coordinated the 19th and 20th Pride anniversaries and was an outspoken advocate for nightlife during the Giuliani era crackdowns. On April 24, 2010 he died peacefully in his sleep of unknown causes.

Laura Garza
(1983-2008?)
Laura Garza was an aspiring dancer who moved from Texas to New York City in 2008. She was last seen leaving Marquee on December 3, 2008 with a man who was later identified as Michael Mele a convicted sex offender. Ms. Garza has been missing since that night, but her remains were identified last week near Scranton Pennsylvania. This new discovery could mean additional charges for Mr. Mele, who is currently serving a one to three year sentence on unrelated charges.

Alejandro Flores
(1984-2010)
Alejandro Flores was a manager of Sin Sin and Leopard Lounge in the East Village. He was a constant fixture at the long running Soulgasm events as well as the open mic and open turntable events that Sin Sin was known for. Alejandro also personally helped me during my experience as a DJ for the Scratch Collective. Unconfirmed reports indicate that on April 24th, Mr. Flores fell onto the tracks and was struck and killed by an MTA train.

Have fun.
G

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