Chapter 3 - Bar at Fifth Avenue Hotel

According to Boy: When I was in Bible College in Springfield (Missouri) I found little out-of-the-way bars intriguing. However, when I moved to New York, they lost their charm for me. In fact, unless Evie was visiting, I never went to a club or a bar. The lone exception to that rule was the bar on the first floor of the hotel where I lived in early 1968, the Fifth Avenue Hotel.


The hotel was located at 24 Fifth Avenue—on the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and 9th Street. It was a fine hotel, by most standards. There were a large number of wealthy old people who lived there. They did not approve of the university students, but they tolerated us.

I think almost every paying tenant at the Fifth Avenue Hotel was long term—old people and students. I don’t recall seeing any salesman types wander through. It was probably for that reason the bar at the hotel was nearly always empty.

Technically it was a piano bar. It had a beautiful, shiny Steinway Grand; but no one ever played it. There was, however, an exception to this rule. One evening as I walked through the lobby, I heard this amazing sound coming out of the bar. I stopped in my tracks, and headed over to get a peek.

Sitting at the piano was this old man, and he was playing the Blues. He had a cigarette burning in an ashtray on the top of the piano, right beside his gin and tonic. The ashtray was half full.

That night I was not the only person who had wandered in to see what was going on. While normally there would be three to five patrons,

on this night there must have been fifteen. My initial thought was that this could be fun, so I took my books up to my room, and brushed my teeth. I then headed down to my newly discovered piano bar.

I don’t know what I ordered, but I think it was probably a beer. That figures, because I really did not like the taste of the standard drinks, such as Scotch or Bourbon. I did not have any idea what a Martini tasted like. Beer was safe; I knew I liked beer.

Even though there were tables available, I chose to sit at the bar. There is just something less lonely looking about a guy sitting at the bar, as opposed to a fellow sitting alone at a table.

I probably sat there enjoying the music for two or three beers. Finally, Mr. Blues Piano Man gathered up the money that grateful patrons had laid on his piano, and he waved a goodbye to the bartender. Within five minutes almost everyone left, including me.

A short time later Evie came out to visit. I had rented her a room at the hotel. On the evening of the second day I told her about this great piano bar at the hotel, and suggested we go down for a while. When we walked in, we noticed that no one was playing the piano, and that there were only a handful of people there, all sitting at the bar. We took a table.

Evie and I each ordered a beer, and talked. We were very good at talking. The longer we sat there, the more obvious it became that this was the loneliest bar in Manhattan—Evie was the only female in the place.

We finished the beer, and decided to hit the Village. I think that might have been the night we discovered what was to become our favorite hangout: a little bar called "The Back Fence."

From that day on every time Evie would come out to visit, we would always hit that little intimate club. It was a hoot. Something was always going on. Evie and I would sit there sometimes for a couple hours, drinking, kissing, and listening to live folk artists.

I often thought about that little boring piano bar at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Had it been cool at all, we might never have ventured over to The Back Fence, the Village Gate, or any of the other great little clubs in the West Village.

Damn, life is good! And one of the best things about it is that you really can go back—at least now that they have turned the Village Gate back into an intimate little nightclub.

And when you can’t actually go back physically, you can write about it—sometimes that can be twice as good.