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For those of you who haven’t been to New York in a while, or have never been at all (gasp!) the great gay mecca of Chelsea is…over.
Yes, sadly, it’s true. The bars are closed, the Chelsea Boys have passed the age of 40 (and they wonder why Bears have proliferated in recent years), and the gayborhood is anything but. The stretch of 8thAvenue from 14th Street to 23rd, once so notoriously M4M that it was dubbed “The Catwalk,” has simply closed up shop. Bars like The View, Stella’s Piano Bar, and the Rawhide fell to skyrocketing rents (and not a little malfeasance on the part of owners). The death knell was the closure of Splash, the space that set the tone for the neighborhood and, indeed, was the originator of the whole Chelsea “look.” In their place are banks, nail salons, and a lingerie store. Really.
But fear not! As seems to be the phenomenon in the Big Apple, gays in west-side Manhattan seem to migrate north one neighborhood and move over one avenue every 20 years. In the 1900s, it was SoHo, and by the 1960s and 70s it was Greenwich Village. Then it was Chelsea’s turn in the 80s to around 2000. Now the spotlight shines on Hell’s Kitchen.
Comic fans may know the name from the Daredevil series on Netflix, but Hell’s Kitchen, is very much a real place. So what if Splash is out? Viva is now the place to go. Therapy, Industry, Blazing Saddles, and ASC are just a few of the watering holes luring boys in. Others, like the Fairy Tail Lounge, are as cruisy as any in Chelsea’s heyday. Stores like Tagg and Universal Gear are nexuses for all the latest in gay fashions (skinny jeans, anyone?) both for the office and boudoir.
On the map, Hell’s Kitchen is a chunk of western Manhattan real estate stretching from 42th Street to around 59th from the Hudson over to Broadway; the gay sector would be around 9th and 10th Avenues from around 43rd St. up to about 56th. If all that seems too much to remember, the best thing to do is grab a copy of Next, the local gay weekly.
And just so you know, even now there are tremors that Hell’s Kitchen is seeing its demographics shift. The funny thing is, the next neighborhood north, the Upper West Side, is already overpriced, so cost-conscious gays are moving even further north to set up shop. What does that mean? In 20 years, the gay place to be in New York may be — drum roll, please! — Harlem.
The times, they are a-changin’.
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