Free My First New York by New York Magazine

I’m saying I don’t want to be a lawyer, and my uncle responds, “All I’ve ever heard you talk about since you were a kid is food and restaurants. Why don’t you just go into the restaurant business?” No one talked about going into the restaurant business back then—not unless you were from Greece or Italy or Czechoslovakia. So I took the LSATs anyway, but my next call was to my college buddy, asking if he would take a restaurant-management class withme. Three classes in, my buddy dropped out. But he felt so bad, he arranged an interview for me with Eugene Fracchia, the owner of Pesca, who looked me up and down and gave me the job of assistant manager on the spot. Two hundred and fifty dollars a week. And it turned out I loved it.

S USANNE B ARTSCH
    party promoter
arrived: 1981
    I came to New York for love. Doesn’t everybody? I never planned to live here. I came on Valentine’s Day for a little affair with a man who asked me to visit him in his apartment at the Chelsea Hotel. It was all fabulously romantic—until, of course, he fell in love with someone else. But I fell in love with New York. And I kept the apartment.
    Oh wait, no—I first came for the opening of Studio 54. But the romance story is the story we tell ourselves. I had been in London having every kind of fun in the rock scene there. I was very close with Mick Jagger and Jimmy Page and the New Romantic crowd. But London was starting to be over—there was so much that was inspiring that it got exhausting—and I was feeling like somewhat of a creature of habit. Whereas in New York there was nothing. You could put a flower in your hair and people thought it was fashion. You could make the nothing into whatever you wanted; New York was like a bare platform begging for set dressings.
    I opened a little shop on Thompson Street, back when nobody was in SoHo. I made a New London in New York. I went to street fashion and the schools, not the established designers. I found Marc Jacobs at Parsons doing this wonderful knitwear, and I scooped up all this fun, Gaudí-esque jewelry by people like Robert Lee Morris. Donna Karan would come into my shop—for inspiration, probably, but who knows?
    There was a culture mob and a few undergroundclubs at the time, but it was very blah. Guys would take off their shirts and dance-dance-dance, but it was not about having “The Look.” So I started wearing my Stephen Jones and just showing off.
    In 1986, Savage opened as a secretary’s after-hours club on West Twenty-third Street. But it really became something when I started hosting the party on Tuesdays, and I have to say, that’s when it all started. You couldn’t just show up and say “I’m here,” like it was Studio 54. You had to have something happening—some drama. People started wearing head-to-toe looks. It was feathers and sequins and platform shoes and leggings and glitter. There was a guy named Stewart who made all my wigs, including my favorite big-haired purple-and-black wig, which I called Babe.
    But it wasn’t just Savage, of course. Arthur Weinstein had a club called the Continental on Twenty-fifth Street that was a little nothing apartment that, one night a week, he turned into something special. People would go to the Jefferson on Fourteenth Street, or the Palladium, Danceteria, Area, MK, Club 57—and then Disco Donuts afterwards. You started seeing people doing lots of shots. It was part of the pace: SlipperyNipples, B-52s, Mudslides, Jägermeister—all washed down with Rolling Rock and Absolut.
    The clubs became gardens for wonderful, special, fantastic, genius orphans of the mainstream. It was a kid culture: enthusiastic and unguarded, where things like the drag taboo became as acceptable—as required, really—as champagne. And it was so necessary and urgent. That’s the thing. The city had been in financial ruin, cocaine and freebasing were