Billy Joel’s Piano Man was inspired by playing at a bar in Los Angeles. Two classic piano bars from that era, Nye’s Polonaise Room in Minneapolis and The Red Fox Room in San Diego continue to thrive after more than fifty years in business.
Category Archives: NYC
Grand Avenue Rapper
In 1966 a summer tradition of outdoor concerts began at Wollman Rink in Central Park. Over the years it featured bands such as Bob Marley and the Wailers, the Ramones and Devo for very cheap.
Bag of Chips
In the 1980s, video stores sold eighteen inch statues with oversized heads of celebrities from music, TV and film. From the 1950s to the 1990s, Esco Products of Brooklyn fabricated hundreds of different figures, from Groucho Marx to Louis Armstrong.
Give me a call
The mixing of entertainment and news can be traced back to the penny press, but the
for the model of New Yorker style personal journalism, we might look to The Spectator
column from the nineteenth century magazine The Outlook.
Was It Real?
Little Italy’s San Gennaro Festival has been the backdrop of multiple movies, including Spike Lee’s Jungle Fever, where an intern got to spin cotton candy.
Paul Mason Fotsch 