The North Star Tavern was located in the South Street Seaport complex right off of Water Street around the corner from Sloppy Louie’s seafood restaurant. I used to meet my buddies who worked on Wall Street down there. They were computer guys when computers first came out and were working for Goldman Sachs of all people. We would meet in the North Star which was an English style Pub with a great selection of beers on tap. They had Guinness and Bass and Newcastle and Samuel Smiths Nut Brown Ale and Boddingtons and John Courage. We would start around 4 in the afternoon and keep drinking and eating till around Midnight when the Seaport used to thin out a lot. Everyone who worked on Wall Street in the Boom Boom Eighties was there. In the summer they would put a table outside with big tubs full of Fosters that can in this can that looked like an Oil Can you would get for your car. We called it the Foster’s Oil Can and would buy them and chat up women who were standing around in the Seaport. It was like St. Patrick’s Day every weekend because people would really get smashed. Occasionally we would wander down Front St to Jeremy’s which was famous for having drunken idiots who would let them cut off their ties and nail them to the rafters or drunken bitches who would take off their bras and throw them up on the beams. But mostly we hung around the North Star because one of our buddies was friends with one of the barmen and we got a lot of freebies. Eventually they put an end to the fun. They wouldn’t let you drink outside. Giuliani put a stop to that. First they had roped off areas and you were penned in like cattle. Then they made a rule that you could only drink inside a bar.The crowds went away and the business went south and the North Star closed. So another great bar closed and another fun time was ended. And the world of fun dies just a little bit more.I mean I know that no one was puking on the steps of the Sharper Image or peeing on the doorway of the McNally map company but a bunch of bars and restaurants went belly up because people couldn’t stand outside on a warm summer night and drink back to back and belly to belly.
5 comments:
Might be nice if there were a law on the books that required that for each law you enacted, you needed to repeal another. It might slow down the bozos. At least it would double their work.
Do you miss those days?
Would you ever want to go back for awhile?
Yeah I would go back to fix some of the things I did wrong. But you can't go back, you can't go back.
Remember it well. Used to go there for a Ploughman's Lunch. Good place.
I wasn't a regular, but I remember Flutie's as the popular place. There was an upstairs deck. The guys took off their suitcoats and stood around in great, billowing Brooks shirts with red suspenders. I don't know if they were actually Wall St. hotshots, but they looked the part. Maybe they were. There were a lot of very good looking women around, and they're usually good judges of such things.....I don't know when the fulcrum moment was but the Seaport died out and Battery Park City, just behind the WTC by the marina, became the place. It had such a gorgeous view of the harbor, plus there were all those yachts to give you the sense that you were in the presence of money. That's an important attraction for the Wall St crowd. I remember people promenading with plastic cups of beer. I don't recall anyone giving them a hard time...I haven't been downtown in years. I wonder if it's still a hot spot. All those ghosts from the WTC would depress me.
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