THEY USED TO SAY that television would finish it off, or AIDS, or Rudy Giuliani, or high rents. The 52nd Street jazz clubs closed, then the discos, then the bathhouses. Somehow, shockingly, people still wanted to dress up, go out, maybe dance, maybe hook up. They did it at parties at the Factory in 1968. (Andy Warhol, both in New York and in the city at large, became a kind of godfather figure to all New York nightlife both before and long after his death in 1987.) Through the years, readers and the people they read about went to Studio 54, or Xenon, or Nell’s, or Life, or MisShapes, or the Carry Nation. Or to Maxwell’s Plum or even the original T.G.I. Friday’s, the city’s first singles bars. Or the Bay Ridge disco called 2001 Odyssey, where a young man who lived for the weekends was first seen in the pages of New York in the summer of 1976, and then in the on-screen body of John Travolta. ¶ Of course, there was a dark side to making the scene. Too many young people went over the edge, got hurt or sick or addicted. But misbehavior, too, is part of the urge to go out—especially among the young and seemingly indestructible. You can’t peacock, or meet someone new, if you stay home safe in your apartment, no matter how cool an apartment it is. The point is to escape into another world, and the route is through human connection, whether mannered or sweaty. A city full of Type A people, poised to blow off some steam on Saturday night.
