8.28.07Friday’s in New York
By Sarah Stodola
The Upper East Side is most famous for its opulent residences and for the familiar names that occupy them, as well as for its museums. It starts at Fifth Avenue bordering Central Park, and continues to Madison, and then Park, and gradually begins to fade in prestige somewhere near Lexington Avenue. Lesser known to those who have never resided in New York City is the area beyond Lexington, where there is another Upper East Side. This, the Upper East Side of the numbered avenues, belongs to the post-collegiate crowd, namely the type of post-collegiate individuals to whom the term “coed” still seems to aptly apply, and who never really strike one as individual. It can be assumed that this came to be because the rents in this area were cheaper than in any other part of Manhattan below Harlem. It can also be assumed that this area remains among the most affordable in Manhattan because of the atmosphere established by these original bargain hunters. To live here is to embrace the kind of life that involves boys’ nights out, baseball caps, Dave Matthews, young women who call their fathers “Daddy,” and MBAs looming on the horizon. Pre-gentrification pioneering artists this crowd is not – When they move in, the prices stay where they are, and so do the demographics.
It has been this way here at least since the early Sixties. I know this because the first TGI Friday’s opened here, on the corner of 63rd Street and First Avenue, in 1965. And that wouldn’t have happened before the coeds arrived.
Still, even though they seem to have spawned TGI Friday’s, I like to think that coeds were different back then. Today, they represent that mass of America for whom college is merely a financial investment, the return on which they expect to begin reaping soon after putting in their face time at the business school. Back then, I imagine that their equivalents majored in the liberal arts and read books in their free time and cared about things; that they sprang from an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. This is only what I like to imagine, to be sure – Anthony Patch certainly would not have gone for dinner at Friday’s.
At any rate, the members of today’s post-collegiate crowd will be here for a stretch in their twenties and then they’ll head for the suburbs, or perhaps in a sign of the times, the exurbs. If you walk along First Avenue in the East 60s and 70s, you are bombarded with the dive bars and sports bars and bar and grills of these long-term tourists to New York City. These bars seem intended to as accurately as possible recreate the college and college-town experience, a concept that is irreconcilable with my idea of Manhattan but which exists in this far pocket of it nonetheless.
I don’t know how many of these bars – or previous incarnations of them – existed in 1965. So I don’t know if TGI Friday’s set off the current profusion in the far UES, or can only lay claim to having spawned it in every suburb and at every freeway exit across the country from here. Either way, it seems highly appropriate that what is now arguably the most far reaching American chain restaurant was created in the pocket of Manhattan that is most like many parts of America outside of New York City.
In 1965, TGI Friday’s was a single-location restaurant, a true local joint, albeit for a transient local population, a population that never aged but rather continually replenished itself. The original “Friday’s,” according to the restaurant’s website, became “THE meeting place for single adults.” Very young single adults, it might have added.
Five years later, in 1970, the second Friday’s opened in Memphis, Tennessee, and then two years after that a third one in Dallas. The owners then joined forces with the goal of blanketing the entire country – with the expressed exception of Manhattan – with TGI Friday’s franchises. It is no surprise that the restaurant expanded in an inter- rather than intra-city manner; a Friday’s in the SoHo or East Village or Times Square of the 1970s simply could not have happened. The only place to go was inland.
Currently, inland has invaded the city. Entering the Friday’s near Madison Square Garden or Rockefeller Center is a transformative experience, taking one straight out of midtown and into the heartland. These restaurants are a taste of suburbia in the city, rather than the other way around.
Of all the things to come out of New York City, then, TGI Friday’s is perhaps the most startling, the item most in contradiction to the universally recognizable distinctiveness of Manhattan; the least “New York” of American institutions. I have to think that when people say that New York City is the trendsetter for the rest of the country, TGI Friday’s is not what they have in mind. But there it is.
And given the context, it makes perfect sense. This speaks to the difference between the New York of reality and the one that I keep tucked away in my heart of hearts, which resides in Brooklyn, the place that I imagine exists a universe away from any part of the Upper East Side, and the place where two years ago Gage and Tollner on Fulton Street, one of the oldest and finest restaurants in the all of New York, was turned into a TGI Friday’s.
It closed again two years later, for lack of patronage. There is yet cause for optimism.
Sarah Stodola is the Executive Editor of Me Three. More information about her can be found here.
© 2007 Me Three
