As a young promoter moving to Manhattan from Queens in 1967, Mr. Kurfirst opened the Village Theater, which metamorphosed into the legendary hippie heaven the Fillmore East, later managed by Bill Graham.
The following year he staged the New York Rock Festival at Singer Bowl in Flushing Meadow Park, an open-air event featuring Janis Joplin and the Doors. Its success helped inspire the concert at Woodstock in 1969.
The Core Club's membership model has all the over-the-top lavishness of a bygone Sex and the City era —- the annual dues only give you access to pay jacked-up prices on everything else. After all, lunch entrées like the club's pan-roasted Loup de mer (sea bass) cost $38. But today, many members say the thrill of belonging to a hermetically sealed bunker in Midtown is more appealing than ever.
"Every time I walk into the club for lunch, I say, 'No recession here,' " says Fred Davis, one of the founding members of the Core Club and a senior partner at the law firm Davis, Shapiro, Lewit & Hayes.
It was a dirtier city then, more violent, more interesting — more accessible to poor, eager young people. We lived four and five to a railroad apartment, the bathtub in the kitchen in some places, the floors lined with clumpy chalk lines of boric acid that were our useless defense against the cockroaches.
We feasted on $4 platters of Indian food in restaurants on Sixth Street where you could bring your own wine. We went everywhere by subway, riding in gray, graffiti-covered cars where half the doors didn’t open and a single, sluggish fan shoved the air about on summer nights. We took a cab sometimes, when there were five of us and we could get a Checker, one person riding on the jump seat, staring out at the long avenues of the city.
It was a gray city, a weary one, an older one. There were, in those days, pornographic theaters in good neighborhoods; Bowery-style wino bars with sawdust on the floor on Upper Broadway; prostitutes along West End Avenue slipping into cars with New Jersey license plates. It was a city, too, that seemed to open up into an infinite series of magic boxes, of novelty shops and diners, delicatessens and corner bakeries, used record stores and bookstores.
Like Barack Obama we read everything we could get our hands on. It was a movie-mad town then, and we lined up for hours in the cold on the East Side to see the latest Fassbinder or Fellini, the new Woody Allen. We nailed long, flapping schedules of all the revival houses to our walls, from the Thalia and the New Yorker, Theater 80 St. Marks and the Bleecker Street Cinemas. I saw my first Broadway show, “Equus,” for $3, and sat on stage.
