My First New York by New York Magazine Page B

couples, the city blacked out for twenty-four hours, the transit strike stopped all the buses, and all of a sudden women who used to wear little pumps to work now started wearing sneakers. I don’t remember leavingthe apartment much. I was just like, “Oh my God, here I am in the city!”
    There were a ton of deserted old buildings in New York, and it was just a matter of finding one that someone would let you move into, and that you could turn into something habitable. The first place I lived in was a sublet from an artist friend on Gold and Fulton streets. It was just one room with a toilet down the hall and a shower that hooked up to the sink in the room. There was some printing company on my floor, and I’d be sharing the toilet with these old-time guys who’d been working there for forty years. My kitchen was just a fridge, two hot plates, and a toaster oven. I think we were all there illegally, because sometimes people would make really elaborate systems of hiding the bed and the kitchen.
    By five o’clock the neighborhood would be deserted, but Robert Longo, Nancy Dwyer, Michael Zwack, Eric Bogosian, and I would go to clubs like the Mudd Club and Tier 3, where punk new-wave bands would play. The scene then was all about artists who were also musicians who were also filmmakers. Sometimes it was about finding a band that was just good to dance to. I remember being at the Mudd Club whenthe B-52s played, and there were only ten of us in the audience, dancing right in front of the stage. Then we’d head to the twenty-four-hour diner on Broadway and Canal Street called Dave’s and get egg creams.
    The first New York job I got was at Macy’s, and I hated it so much I quit after one day. I wanted to work in the cosmetics department—I was interested in makeup—but their personnel screening placed me as the assistant-assistant-assistant buyer to the bathrobe department. It was just so horrible, in some windowless part of the building. After Macy’s I worked in the afternoons as a receptionist at a gallery called Artist Space on Franklin and Hudson for $80 a week. Nancy worked at Barnes & Noble. We all wanted to make art, but I don’t think any of us expected to live off our work. We mostly showed at alternative galleries where nobody bought anything, and we didn’t expect otherwise. If you did sell something, it was such a treat, such a shock, that somebody would buy it.
    When I was a teenager in Long Island, I’d come into the city once in a while with some girlfriends, and all we would do is go to Macy’s and try on clothes. And when I was in college I would dress up in public and be in character (like, say, a pregnant woman) at an opening or a party. I tried that in New York a couple of times at my receptionist job. Once I went to work as a nurse. And another time as a secretary from the 1950s. I sort of fit in because I was sitting in front of the desk, and I’d be like, “What would you like? What do you need?” But it gave me the creeps to do it in New York, I think because I felt too vulnerable.

J ANN W ENNER
    magazine editor
arrived: 1977
    W hen Rolling Stone decided to move our headquarters from San Francisco, we settled on 745 Fifth Avenue, at the corner of the Plaza, with a wraparound terrace overlooking Central Park. If you’re going to move across the country, why not move to the heart of the city?
    We were the first new thing to move into New York in years. Everyone was fleeing. Corporate headquarters were moving to Connecticut and Westchester. So we had a big party at the MoMA sculpture garden, and Mayor Beame gave us the key to the city. President Ford came by because his son Jack was working for us. Jackie Onassis couldn’t have been more gracious. She’d have dinner parties at her house, and invite people she wanted to introduce us to. Literary types like Pete Hamill and Mike Nichols I remember distinctly.
    The people we