It's 4 a.m. on a Saturday morning, and I am smoking nervously outside Mars Bar when Amy Koteles stops me at the door. She tells me that Morgan Maginio, a 24-year-old crust-punk with hair dyed a flaming red (and a white mouse perched on her shoulder), is waiting for me inside. more

George Nashak has been trying to keep the peace with his sympathetic smile. Since the meeting began at 6:30 p.m., Nashak, who is the Deputy Commissioner of Adult Services for New York City's Department of Homeless Services, along with Christopher King, an attorney for the city, have been the most visible of the five city officials facing irate neighbors to discuss the proposal concerning a 12-story, 328-bed homeless facility scheduled to open this month at 127 W. 25th St. in Chelse more

The mannequins filed off and The Beets, the spirited, Jackson Heights-based trio, started tuning up and quickly launched into a set of Ramones-influenced garage rock. Those famous punks from Forest Hills figure so heavily in The Beet's cosmology that the band has its own sort of Arturo Vega. His name is Matthew Volz, and he's partial to artwork with "a lot of blood and guts." Asked his artistic influences, he said, "Vega, man, and the trannies with switchblades in Jackson Heights." more

Back in September, nightlife blogs buzzed with sweeping pronouncements about the impact a rebranded Don Hills the two-decades-old Greenwich Street institution newly reopened with capital provided by club mavens Nur Khan and Paul Sevignywould have on the moribund Manhattan demimonde. more

"There isn’t anywhere else to get fucking drink in this neighborhood,” my friend Patrick said sadly as the two of us walked out of Mona’s onto Avenue B. more

WALKING PAST ITS neon-lit red brick facade at night, you can’t help but recall reading about the scenes that unfolded inside. Perhaps an image circa 1953 springs to mind—a bloated Dylan Thomas raging vainly against a fatal pneumonia by soaking himself with morphine and scotch; or an electric-era Bob Dylan staying “up for days” writing the songs that would make Blonde on Blonde after taking what he enigmatically calls “the cure;” or a Tuinal-zonked Sid Vicious in 1979, pounding on the doors of the crowd Burroughs called “the junkies of the Chelsea Hotel.” When it stood as a fortress of America’s artistic demimonde for over three decades, such Dionysian iconography was mass-produced inside the walls of the Chelsea Hotel. more

In the summer of 1954, a 19-year-old kid from a working-class South Brooklyn neighborhood took the subway up to Columbia University. He had dropped out of Catholic high school at 16 and joined the more

In 1990, a 13-year-old who wanted to know what went on inside of Max's Kansas City during the late '60s and early '70s would have to search for clues. He would pour over passages in Jim Carroll's Downtown Diaries enough times and listen over and over to the Velvet's Live at Max's, recorded in 1970, pausing especially for the few snippets of unmuffled dialogue (Lou Reed telling the crowd to dance; Carroll asking a waiter for "a double Pernod"). He would take a walk up to Park avenue South and East 17th Street, see what was there and try to blot it out with an imagined black-andwhite marquee moon. If he did all that, a mental picture might begin to come into focus: andy Warhol's red-lit court and its swirl of artists, drag queens, superstars and speed freaks. more

Despite a long literary career, George Plimpton was never far from the center of East Hampton’s—or Manhattan’s— nighttime social firmament. So a few Julys after he passed awa more

Penthouse magazine’s halcyon days are a distant memory, but the idea of a few minutes’ face-time with skimpily attired Pets sparked the excitement of enough bridge-and-tunnel weekend warriors—of both sexes—to nearly fill the West 26th Street nightclub Pomme on Friday night. more