Saturday, September 4, 2010

Noted


Today, the Post blows the lid off the underground party scene hereabouts ... let's just jump right in, shall we?

It’s a typical Saturday night on the Lower East Side, and the streets are packed with partygoers consulting GPS systems for bars and clubs. Skillfully dodging the bridge-and-tunnel types that crowd the neighborhood on weekends, Fatima Siad makes her way to Ridge Street.

It’s not as fun to go out on weekends in the Lower East Side,” says Siad, a 24-year-old downtown stunner who once appeared on “America’s Next Top Model.”

Surely, a hip person such as Siad is headed to a hot new boite with a velvet rope, or a fancy rooftop bar? Not even close.

Her destination is a tenement building that has the front door propped open with a brick. Inside, a staircase leads to an abandoned second-floor unit, which was reportedly a drug den three years ago. Tonight, this newly cleaned-up spot is the place to be for roughly 40 tastemakers, who are part of the city’s burgeoning pop-up party scene. Fed up with commercialized, overpriced nightclubs, creative young New Yorkers are taking night life back, according to 27-year-old artist Adam Aleksander, who organizes pop-up parties like the one that happened here two Saturdays ago.



[Photo of a recent Renaissance-style party via the Post.]

4 comments:

Lisa said...

"...if you’re going to a club in the Meatpacking District, you’re going to see the same old same old".

Oh my God, the irony - this woman is too young to remember when the Meatpacking District hosted the legendary club Mother/Jackie 60/Click and Drag (the name depended on the night), which had a strict dress code and demanded that their clientele come dressed as elegantly and uniquely as possible. Among many other events, they had the annual "Night of a Thousand Stevies", in which men and women alike dressed (and performed) as Stevie Nicks. They had Fetish Nights. They welcomed the vampire group that existed at that time - those folks were usually to be found there on Saturday nights, in the downstairs lounge, dressed in Goth black, with painted contact lenses and many of them with permanently-attached fangs. It was an amazing, eclectic, multi-faceted, innovative space, and among those who frequented it it's still much-mourned.

This is the dress code from a Click & Drag event:
A STRICT CYBER/FETISH/TRIBAL DRESS CODE WILL BE COMPLETELY ENFORCED: WEAR AQUARIAN FLOURISHES, GLITTER BEARDS AND MERKINS, RESPLENDENT RAGS, PAGAN CHIC, WATERFALL HEADDRESSES, TURQUOISE PAINT, GODDESS OR TRANS-GODDESS, BODY-ADORNED or CYBER, FETISH, TRIBAL, GENDER-HACKING, FAERIE, GOTHIC OR BRILLIANT BLACK. ABSOLUTELY NO STREET CLOTHES OR MUNDANES - NO EXCEPTIONS.

From a website:
JACKIE 60 was begun in 1990 by local night life luminaries CHI CHI VALENTI and JOHNNY DYNELL, choreographer RICHARD MOVE and British fashion designer KITTY BOOTS. Disillusioned with the stale, over-commercialized state of the New York night, the four set out to create a club environment that was performance oriented and distinctly underground in tone. They developed the Jackie 60 formula, with its weekly themes and live, stream-of-consciousness MCs. In March 1991, the Jackies moved to a small bar in the then-seedy Meat Market district, which later became the underground venue MOTHER. To its fanatical mixed following (some of whom had abandoned clubs decades ago), Jackie 60 fast became a Mecca. The club assumed a level of audience sophistication unparalleled in Gotham, and Jackie regulars from designer Marc Jacobs to pop supernova Debbie Harry consistently rose to the challenge.

The space is now, of course, some kind of designer boutique that looks like every other designer boutique in the area. And whether Fatima Siad wants to think it or not, it's the influx of people like her that made it impossible for a place like Jackie 60 to continue to exist.

Marty Wombacher said...

I'll take the plop-down party at the Mars bar over this stuff any old day of the week.

prodigal son said...

The NY Post runs this story every four years ago. I think they keep it in the morgue and just change the names and locations. I'm also pretty sure there is no actual person named "Fatima Siad".

The story is silly because they are basically talking about people hosting parties in their own apartments, which people have probably been doing since colonial times.

Buried here is a news story that is somewhat interesting. There were always places in Manhattan where the bar scene looked like a parody of a main strip of a college town in the Midwest, but now this describes most of downtown. There is a fringe that doesn't quite look like this, but in the East Village and the LES it keeps being pushed farther and farther east. In a few years it won't be able to migrate further east because of the river, and that will be pretty much it for any half-decent nightlife in Manhattan.

Anonymous said...

Fatima exists, she was on ANTM cycle 10 and she goes to my gym, or used to, I've seen her once.

I can tell you that if this were my tenement and a bunch of dickheads who didn't live even there decided to prop the door open and tramp back and forth through the building all night, I'd be calling the cops. Just because you're oh-so-over the clubs doesn't give you the right to take over someone's home for a night. Assholes.