SPEAKEASIES AS SIMULACRA
DESCRIPTION
Nightlife culture is part and parcel of the character of New York City. The public, be it the marketplace or the pub, act as centers of everyday individual and communal existence that shape the experiences of people and color the culture as a whole. These spaces have specific, codified forms of mediation.
The speakeasy, both as an historical icon and locality, is no different. As centers of media, culture was created and negotiated in terms of race, economy, linguistics, and the dialectic of power.
With time, however, we as New Yorkers feel nostalgia for these places, and in their place create hyperreal centers of media that try to strike a balance between the past and the present, resulting in the obfuscation of what the past really is.
TAGS
MEMBERS
- Kwame Opam (Primary Investigator)
RECENTLY ADDED RECORDS
- The original Cotton Club saw such African-American musicians as Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Count Basie, and Ella Fitzgerald play there in its heyday during the 1930s. It in particular, along with its cousins downtown like the Onyx on 52nd, catered to the popularization of jazz music, as it was attached both to sociopolitical resistance and having a good time.
- The Raines Law Room's look and feel dates back to before Prohibition. Passed in 1896, the Raines Law was meant to keep sobriety on Sundays by prohibiting the sale of alcohol on Sundays except by hotels. To circumvent the law, saloon owners bought hotel licenses after furnishing small bedrooms. In this way, they were able to sell their alcohol undaunted. Today, this hotel makes use of the story to create a unique bar look, where the bar itself is styled after the island in a rather ritzy kitchen.
- "BY now, most of the reviews of the decade-that-just-was have been filed, and a consensus has emerged: If not "the worst decade ever," as Time magazine put it, the '00s were awful. Unless, that is, you spent the decade drinking. That sounds like a joke but isn't, because among all the things that didn't improve in the last 10 years -- macro stuff like the global economy, geopolitical stability, the environment, etc. -- one thing, admittedly micro, did improve: the drinks we drank, for pleasure or, considering the above, analgesia. If you observed the '00s from a barstool, and limited your reading to cocktail menus (as I did, as author of this column for almost four years), you'd be forgiven for deeming the decade a bona fide golden age. For my final column, then, a toast: to 10 years of fizzes, slings, juleps, sours, cobblers and rickeys, to a time when the avant-garde seemed to shift almost nightly, to the best decade in generations. We greeted the decade with sugary, vodka-based "-tinis" -- which, despite their suffixed claim to noble descent, were in some ways extensions of the neon drinks of the '80s: alcoholic candy. Yet a quiet revolution was already under way. Building upon the work of Dale DeGroff, the former Rainbow Room bartender, young bartenders, casting aside process mixers, were gleaning inspiration from their counterparts in restaurant kitchens and perusing antique cocktail books like scholars combing the Dead Sea scrolls. The first half of the decade saw a wave of creativity and experimentation come crashing through barrooms in cities like New York and San Francisco and Portland, Ore., followed, in the decade's second half, by a counterblast of earnest classicism."