The Short, Drunken Life of Club Row

The Article: An excellent article in New York magazine by Isaiah Wilner detailing the rise and fall of 27th Street.

Choice bits (since the article is long, read it at the New Yorker website):

Nightclubs were big business now. If you carried a black AmEx card, you could count on getting in, somewhere. “Bottle service—it was a killer,” one club worker recalls. “Because now you didn’t have to look right to get in. The owners didn’t care about the quality of the crowd. The bottom line was the money. It was, Sell those tables, sell those tables, up-sell, magnums, bottle minimums. And you now had—forgive me for saying it—every undesirable seated in a nightclub.”

The same summer, B.E.D., which had opened in January on the sixth floor, debuted its rooftop lounge. “That’s when all the bridge-and-tunnel guys came in,” a 27th Street veteran recalls. “These are the guys who brought the Jersey girls and the short shorts. They mobbed the whole street. And then, when you walked to Bungalow, you saw seven trashy blonde chicks standing outside begging to be let in, and guess what? It takes away from the atmosphere.”

By the summer of 2006, the street crawled with people—forcing the police to barricade both ends. Masses of visored men in bright T-shirts stumbled through, smoking joints, carrying plastic cups, urinating on the walls. Thin girls toddled out in spike heels. It was a boozy Cancún North. People threw up in front of buildings and on their clothes; turned away at the door, they spat at the doormen. “We’d find people passed out in the bathroom,” recalls a former employee of B.E.D. “You would think it was a dead body. Passed out, like scary passed out, like smack them, pick them up, they’re like Jell-O, like someone took their spine out. And on the street. You would literally see people face down in the gutter.”

And the keeper:

“It’s not about who you know, it’s how you carry yourself,” says one visibly excited man, tonguing his teeth and working his jaw as he strides with his friend toward the bar in back. “I’m the guy that walked in, said ‘hi,’ paid for my drinks, did my blow in the bathroom, and came out smiling. They respect me for it.”

The importance: Not much frankly, except for the lesson of keeping people from New Jersey out of your club if you want it not to be a cesspool of disgusting human beings.