The Settings of MANHATTAN .45 #2: El Morocco

El Morocco is long gone, as are most of the speakeasies that had their beginnings during Prohibition, like the Stork Club and the Cotton Club. The 21 Club survived until 2020, closing as a victim of COVID and never reopening.

But the speakeasy scene remains alive and well in New York City. An example is Apotheke, located at the elbow of a dark alley in Chinatown known as “the Bloody Angle,” whose claim to fame is that supposedly more murders have been committed there than at any other corner in America (see accompanying photograph—not a place one would willingly wander down late at night, although this author has managed cocktails there multiple times and survived; the hanging panel inscribed with the deceptive “Chemist” is the bar’s only signage). The Raines Law Room in Chelsea is another example: a dozen uninviting steps down from a dirty sidewalk leads to a plain black door with a bell push, but on the other side is a different world: dark, intimate, sophisticated, and the cocktails are well made. There are many others scattered across Manhattan, mostly below 42nd Street. The common theme is that they are small, tucked away in odd places, often beneath street level, either ambiguously signed or completely anonymous, and they don’t encourage drop-ins.

Outside the strictly speakeasy scene, Manhattan bars have evolved in odd ways not often encountered elsewhere. For example, they’re sometimes associated with performance. “Trust & Life,” immersive theater on an industrial scale, has a bar occupying their big former banking hall complete with historic WPA murals and brass teller windows still intact, behind which the bartenders take your order. The bar scene at “Masquerade”—formal wear required—is frankly a better spectacle than the show. These performances can get personal: at “The Clown Bar” this author had to comfort one of the clowns who began crying on his shoulder; at “Trust & Life” a more congenial task was to unzip an actress; and when leaving “Masquerade” the coat check lady laughed at all the lipstick from when one of the girls in the cast got carried away.

Then there are the hotel bars. The modern boutique hotel scene began in 1984 when native New Yorker Ian Schrager, freshly released from prison following the collapse of his Studio 54, and perhaps feeling the need for more upscale accommodation, opened the Morgans Hotel near the library of the same name. Now, forty years later, the world is awash in Morgans knockoffs, but NYC moved on long ago: Morgans Hotel closed in 2018.

The current trend in New York is not for modernism but singularity, and the fashionable establishments now either occupy or build quarters that will distinguish them architecturally, so there are superb bars like the Swan Room at Nine Orchard (in the 1912 Beaux-Arts Jarmulowsky Bank Building, illustrating the old) or like the under-the-see-through-swimming-pool lounge at Dream Downtown (an example of the new). The focus is not on comfort or convenience but pure style. A recent stay in the Empire suite at the Standard Highline, a top-floor corner set of rooms bigger than most Manhattan apartments, revealed a wall-length built-in bar in the main room, a secondary bar in the bedroom, presumably for mixing nightcaps without having to rejoin the party, multiple lounging areas with magnificent views through the floor-to-ceiling windows, and an excellent audio system—but there was nothing so everyday as a desk, nor even a coffee maker.

Then there are extravagant one-night-only black-tie affairs that often recall movie sets—a scene from The Thin Man, say, or Eyes Wide Shut. And, lastly, there is the ongoing round of cocktail receptions, exhibition openings, charitable galas, and the like. These are sometimes associated with the financial world, occasionally the musical, or directly with charities in which one is expected to not leave without writing a check, but the best are part of either the fashion or art worlds. When these two combine, the result can be a blast, as with the after-party following the global premiere of the movie “Simply Ralph,” held at the Met’s Temple of Dendur.

In summary, the old Prohibition-era speakeasies might be gone, but New York remains a pretty good drinker’s town.