Bill's Gay 90s closing

[dhermann1]

Bill's Gay 90s Bar, a New York institution for almost a century, has lost its lease and has closed its doors. A bunch of Loungers, including myself, Miss Bela Hell, Feraud, Senator Jack, etc., had a great time there a couple years ago. It was a perfectly preserved bar that dated from before Prohibition. It had photographs of John L. Sullivan and Man O' War, among many others, all over the walls. What a place. They say they're going to reopen soon in a similar location as near as possible to the old one. Didn't work when Luchow's clesed, years ago. Let's hope Bill's is an exception to the rule.
And a pox on all greedy stupid philistine landlords.

http://vanishingnewyork.blogspot.com/2012/03/bills-gay-90s.html
http://billsnyc.com/

 

[Feraud]

Ugh..I am so sorry to read this. I really liked Bill's and was so looking forward to taking my son there for a drink.

Over the last few years my wife and I have followed the closing of one New York City institution after another as noted in sites like Vanishing New York. This city is no longer the great metropolis it once was. The culture is dead and the nightlife is stunningly mediocre.
The Dances of Vice/Wit's End events are the very rare exceptions to the rule.

 

[Fletch]

I was disappointed in them for getting rid of the G-word in the sign outside. It showed a certain lack of that old New York nonchalance.

Still, Mr. F has a point. That New York is about gone. The nonchalance long ago hardened into apathy. In its place, more of the agida, the tsuris, and the...mmmph, whatever the Irish call it. They might not have a name for it, actually. Someone call Pete Hamill and ask him.

Anyway, I've been to Vanishing New York and it has a different point of view yet...they're actually nostalgic for the Drop Dead years, the era of decline and dystopia. Back before that it's all a fairy tale anyway...right?

 

[dhermann1]

Luckily PJ Clarke's, and Fanelli's, and McSorley's, and White Horse Inn, and the Old Town Bar, and the Corner Bistro and a few others are still around.

 

[Stanley Doble]

Ah yes Bill's Gay Nineties where the men are gay and the women are 90.

Seriously, wonder how many know the name referred to the 1890 and the original meaning was quite different?

 

[Fletch]

Ah yes Bill's Gay Nineties where all the men are gay and the women are 90.

 

[samtemporary]

Just saw a little 10 minute film on TCM last week entitled "The Gay '90s" (one of those little snippets they have between movies every so often). My wife saw it on the DVR and was a little confused. I made her watch it, and she was pleasantly surprised it referred to the roaring 1890s. The film was from 1938, and featured recreations of 1890s entertainment, songs, etc. Needless to say, it was very, very cool.

 

[skyvue]

This city is no longer the great metropolis it once was. The culture is dead and the nightlife is stunningly mediocre.

With respect, Feraud (believe me, I, too, mourn Bill's closing; I liked it there), people have been bemoaning the death of the New York culture for at least a hundred years. For all the disappointment and disinterest we might feel toward the nightlife of today, there are plenty of twenty-somethings who are living it up and are convinced they're living in a very special time. For them, these are the good old days.

Here's an excerpt from something Theodore Dreiser wrote about New York "as it was between 1900 and 1914 or '15, or thereabout...":

The city is larger. It has, if you will, more amazing architectural features. But has it as vivid and moving social contrasts,--as hectic and poignant and disturbing mental and social aspirations as it had then? I cannot see that it has. Rather, as it seems to me, it is duller because less differentiated. There are millions and millions but what do they do? Tramp aimlessly, for the most part, here and there in shoals, to see a ball game, a football game, a parade, a prize-fight, a civic betterment or automobile exhibition or to dance or dine in a hall that hold a thousand. But of that old zest that seemed to find something secret and thrilling in a thousand nooks and corners of the old city, its Bowery, its waterfront, its rialto, its outlying resorts, not a trace. One cannot even persuade the younger generation, that never even knew the old city, to admit that they feel a tang of living equivalent to what they imagined once was. The truth is that it is not here. It has vanished--along with the generation that felt it.
​

Mind you, Dreiser wrote that in 1923, an era in NYC that many of us would give our eyeteeth to experience. But he was convinced that anyone who was a new arrival to the city in the 1920s had really missed the boat.

And every ensuing generation has, in my experience, felt much the same.

I've often opined that transplants from elsewhere transform into true New Yorkers when a favorite dining, drinking or retail establishment (or three) has been shuttered and they become convinced that New York City simply isn't what it once was, back in "their" day.

 

[Feraud]

I expect future generations will lament the loss of the last Starbuck's in NYC as a seemingly irreplacable loss of culture in the city.

 

[skyvue]

I expect future generations will lament the loss of the last Starbuck's in NYC as a seemingly irreplacable loss of culture in the city.

Ha! Very true.

 

[Stanley Doble]

When you want to close a business or move it, blaming the landlord can be a convenient excuse. I am sure there are many occasions when someone doesn't want to divulge the real reason so they say the landlord refused to renew the lease or the like.