Why Early ’80s New York Matters Today (Published 2018) (2024)

A polarizing Republican in the White House. Protests for equality in the streets. A new wave of sexual self-identification. This was N.Y.C. in the early ’80s, during the 36 months in which it changed art, design, activism, food, literature and love — forever.

DECADES ARE LIKE PEOPLE. Some take up more oxygen than others. The 1980s were that way, most notably at the start and especially in New York City, which was pulling back from the precipice of bankruptcy and peaco*cking toward boom times. People lived louder and larger than they had just years before. They also died younger, in unforeseen ways. Extravagance and AIDS: These were the yin and yang of New York then, and they infused the city with an intensity and creative energy that changed it forever.

I remember. One week stands out. In a throng of ludicrously eager pilgrims, I saw “Cats,” which opened on Broadway in 1982 and was the purring toast of the town, with the orchestra seats that everyone agitated for, never mind that it was a tribute mostly to how much money could be lavished on furry costumes and how many fake whiskers could be painted on a human face. A few days later, a less tricked-out theater: “Torch Song Trilogy,” which also opened on Broadway in 1982 and addressed the gay lust for sex — and the gay longing for respect — with a radical candor and an irresistible pathos. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s gaudy spectacle and Harvey Fierstein’s raspy cry from the heart had nothing to do with each other, though they had everything to do with early 1980s New York.

One night stands out, too. In a scrum of people leagues prettier and infinitely better at aloofness, I stood outside a hallowed portal on the heady chance that a doorman would let me hand over a cover charge of $15 — a fortune for a college student like me — and grant me admission to Area, which was less a dance club than a sanctum. To get inside was to be baptized, consecrated, canonized. When I did, I couldn’t bring myself to utter so much as a syllable to anyone around me, and I couldn’t peel my gaze from Area’s most famous flourish, a gargantuan tank in which dwarf sharks slalomed. They spoke to a project underway in much of downtown Manhattan, which sought to tame what was once wild and turn it into outré ornament. These sharks were also quintessential New Yorkers, their aura of fierceness wed to an agenda of fabulousness.

New York was suddenly full of loopy fantasies like Area’s. They bloomed long after dark, through the haze of cocaine and Ecstasy, in wonderlands like the Saint and Paradise Garage and Danceteria and later, the Limelight, which came along in 1983. What a year that was, with harbingers that we didn’t recognize then: Trump Tower opened amid the shimmering emporiums of Fifth Avenue, and Donald Trump appeared for the first time in the pages of the newly resurrected Vanity Fair. It would quickly become the decade’s bible, channeling and amplifying a fresh obsession with wealth, with celebrity and with the rituals and foibles of Americans (particularly New Yorkers) who had achieved either or both. And it described Trump, with no small measure of flattery and a complete absence of foreboding, as a “blue-eyed blond in the Tab Hunter mold.”

But there were bigger bogeymen to worry about then, Ronald Reagan foremost among them. The outsize reverence for him later obscured how much fear he sowed after he assumed the presidency in 1981 and how much the response to him in the first years of his administration was like the response to Trump now, at least among Americans who hadn’t voted for him.