Before we opened the store, the wife was the general manager at Kevin St. James in Hells Kitchen. It was one of my clients and she ran the whole operation. Kevin who was the managing partner was a real piece of work. But he had a lot of good ideas that I passed on to other bar owners.One of them is that you had to get rid of the "chase away guy." He was the dude that would hit on every girl and try to start a conversation with them. I mean he might be superficially OK but he is a psycho and made the girls uncomfortable to the point they would walk out. So if he saw a guy hitting on girl after girl as a serial asshole, he would toss him. You see a woman has a right to sit and have a drink without dudes pestering them. I mean if they want to meet someone that's cool. But they can come in alone and have a drink and not be bothered. Unlike the sports bar next door where it was a free for all. So his bar got to be known as the place where girls could go just to have fun. Of course he would give them free shots and they would end up dancing on the bar and waving their bras over their heads but that's another story.
You see you can't ask people for money and then expect them to police the joint themselves. That's your job. You have to control your space. Make it user friendly. Or else you lose out to the bar down the street.
Anyways someone bought the whole block of Eight Avenue between 46th and 47th and they knocked down most of the buildings to put up a skyscraper with a bunch of condos. It is not finished yet and I wonder how that is going to work out in this economy. But nevertheless the bar is gone. When the eviction was in the offing we started planning to start the store and we made a clean getaway.
But it was a cool place in it's day.
11 comments:
To all the bars I've love before...
This deserves a 'things are not as they seem tag', no?
No, it can stand alone. It is not really about what you might think it is about. You do need to take control of your place. I was thinking about that in terms of the woman who posted nasty crap about the store. But it is valid about other things as well and I think it is valid to see as an oblique commentary. But that is not the primary purpose at all.
But you catch everything don't you?
Boy I would hate to be one of your kids lying to you Ruth Anne.
i'm tired of saying it...
Nothing worth doing is not worth overdoing.
I dislike thinking , especially on holidays. But this blog is the place us babes can drink without being bothered by assholes, no?
RAA seems to have too much common sense to be one of them.
Sometimes a simple rule, well-enforced will work wonders.
Back when I was an RA, I had one rule that I really enforced: If you are playing music in your room, you have to have your door shut. This one rule solved so many problems:
Kept noise down.
Eliminated volume contests between rooms.
Limited the size of a party to the number of people who could fit into one room.
You know, all Arthur Miller did was clean up some Salem trial transcripts.
The metaphor was just an accident.
This is a sweet vidalia onion of a story. Where to begin to peel back the layers?
Since I long ago figured out how to take care of myself in bars, I'll leave that layer alone for now.
I will say however, that the very same women who didn't figure out how to take care of themselves in bars are the very same women who needed assistance in their workplace. We all know how that one ended for both sexes.
Now that our society is in a "policing mode", there's always someone, some group or some body of legislators who will be more than happy to make some new rules for us. And we all know how THAT story ends too.
Me? Why I LONG for the day when we all have exactly the same sensibilities and exactly the same shared thoughts...by the hour even!
Cause some nights I just feel like dancing on that bar without stepping on anyone's toes.
Thanks for your comment Penny. You have to understand that not every woman has learned to be as confident as you. Especially when they are younger. So it is OK if we look out for you. You can have a few drinks and get walked to a cab and not have to worry. And if the girls want to come to your bar, then the guys want to come to your bar. And you can dance on tables as much as you want, you can just be sure you won't have to do anything you don't want to do.
Just like everyone else, I am confident about some things, and not so confident about other things.
In any case, it was nice of the owner to look after those young girls stepping out alone. Sad though that some big guys ended up having their way with his property, and just when he thought he had things under control too.
I wonder if he started over somewhere else?
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