The New York I Miss
I don't miss old New York because it was better. A lot of it wasn't. I miss it because it was weirder.
Old New York was made for the misfits, the outcasts, the artists and dreamers who didn't belong anywhere else. They came here and somehow understood that this was where they were needed. Like bricklayers, each one added something to the foundation of what many consider the cultural center of the world. That's what made New York, New York.
We argue about pizza and caviar with the same fervor. To us, everything has to be the best. Your outfit better be as crispy as the food you eat. And the main rule of being a New Yorker has always been pretty simple: If you cool, you cool. Doesn't matter what you do. Just do it right, and do it with authenticity.
That's why, when we started thinking about what we wanted our space to become, we knew it couldn't feel designed by a committee. It couldn't be somebody else's idea of what a New York restaurant was supposed to look like. It just had to represent. Represent. Like Nas. Nothing else mattered. We wanted to stand on ten toes and honor the people who came before us—the artists, musicians, writers, athletes, rebels, weirdos and visionaries who moved culture forward and changed the world with their ideas and talent.
Because that's the New York I miss. Not necessarily the old one. The weird one.
I don't think you can look at the pictures on our walls and put us into some neat little societal box to be prodded, analyzed and judged. We just like what we like, and hopefully you like some of it too. We've got everyone from Walter Mercado to Max Roach to Black Moon to the New York Dolls, just to name a few. If you can't find something on those walls that speaks to you, maybe you need to broaden your horizons a little.
And maybe that's what I really miss about New York. People weren't always asking permission to like something. You could be into hip hop and punk. Jazz and salsa. Fine art and graffiti. Pizza and caviar. You didn't need an algorithm to tell you whether those things belonged together. You liked what you liked.
Somewhere along the way, I think we started losing some of that. It's easy to feel like what you're creating isn't good enough, especially when you don't have a lot of money and you're trying to survive in this hyper-capitalist game where money seems to trump everything. We're surrounded by people getting what they want immediately. Food delivered in twenty minutes. A song in two seconds. A movie with one click. An opinion before we've even had enough time to form one.
Social media made that even more complicated. We're constantly being told what's working, what's trending, what's getting clicks, what people are watching and what we should make next. Eventually you can start creating for the reaction instead of creating because you actually have something to say. We stopped making things for ourselves and started making them for likes.
And I think something gets lost when we do that, because the people hanging on our walls didn't become interesting by asking everybody what they wanted first.
They made shit.
Actually, MAKE SHIT is one of our core values around here. And no, it doesn't mean make something bad. It means stop waiting for permission. Stop waiting until you have enough money. Stop waiting for the perfect equipment, the perfect space, the perfect idea or for somebody to tell you that what you're doing is going to work.
Make the song. Write the screenplay. Paint the picture. Start the business. Cook the dish. Put on the show. MAKE SHIT.
If you're lucky, one thing you make will be truly great. Most of it will suck. Some of it will fail completely. That's part of it. You can't create anything worthwhile if you're too afraid to create something bad. And I think the people hanging on our walls understood that. Some people loved what they made. Some people hated it. Some people didn't understand it at all. But they made it anyway.
That's the part of old New York I'm really trying to hold onto. Not the dirt. Not the crime. Not some romanticized version of a city that never really existed. I miss the courage to be weird. The freedom to like what you like. The willingness to make something without knowing whether anyone is going to applaud. The idea that you didn't need a million followers, a marketing plan or somebody else's approval to decide that your idea deserved to exist.
And that's a big part of what we're trying to create at UVK and Muse. I don't want everything we do to make sense to everybody. Honestly, if it did, I'd probably be worried. Why does a vegan restaurant have graffiti on the walls, a Bernard King jersey, Tom Waits, Public Enemy, mushroom coffee, blues musicians, hip hop, cocktails and a guy we call The Alchemist making tea in the back?
Because we like that shit. Because it's us. Because it's New York.
Maybe I don't miss old New York. Maybe I just miss being surprised by New York. And maybe that's something worth bringing back.
But if I'm being truthful, there's probably another reason I care about all of this.
I do it for that 16-year-old kid standing on the 7 train platform, waiting for the train that will take him into the Village. He's standing there imagining what might be waiting for him on the other side of that ride. Music he's never heard. People he's never met. Art he doesn't understand yet. Maybe a club he probably isn't old enough to get into. The possibilities are endless, and that's the whole point.
Funny that it's called The Village, because that's where we found our tribe.
For a kid who never felt completely comfortable fitting into the boxes that were handed to him, downtown New York offered something different. You could be whoever the hell you wanted to be. Punk. Hip hop. Artist. Writer. Skater. Vegan. Weirdo. Some combination of all of them. Nobody needed you to explain yourself first.
That train wasn't just taking me downtown. It was taking me somewhere my heart and soul could be free.
And maybe, after all these years, that's what I'm still trying to create on 23rd Street. A little place for the misfits. A place where a 16-year-old kid—or a 56-year-old one—can walk through the door, look around and think:
Yeah. These are my people. That's the New York I miss. And that's the New York I don't want to lose.
Peace,
Dave