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.
