WHERE WE DRANK, AND FOUGHT, AND ATE BIG MACS WITH Andy Warhol
TO A HEEDLESS VISITOR, every Mcdonald’s looks about the same. But for as long as the fast-food chain has been in New York (its first store opened here in 1972), certain locations have served different purposes—as a high-low venue for a blacktie benefit gala attended by Andy Warhol in 1976, a quasi rec center for elderly Korean patrons in Flushing in 2014, or simply as hubs for various, and often debaucherous, crews throughout the five boroughs. In the late aughts, at around 2 or 3 a.m., when the Lower East Side nightlife scene known as Hell Square began shutting down, the Mcdonald’s on Delancey and Essex provided an antidote to closing time: You didn’t have to go home, and you absolutely could stay there. “It was another character in our lives. It wasn’t just an establishment,” says Brenden Ramirez, a bartender who remembers eating “Mcgangbangs” (a folkloric Mcdonald’s item that involves shoving a Mcchicken into a Mcdouble) while patrons took swings at one another. Lola Jiblazee, who hosted parties at clubs like Hotel Chantelle and the DL, would often marshal groups of people who thought they were following her to an after-party for a late-night visit. In Tribeca, the Chambers Street Mcdonald’s has long replaced suburban family basements for Stuyvesant High School students in need of somewhere to misbehave. “If before a school dance, you wanted to get a little buzz, that was the place to be,” says Emma Carlisle, who graduated in 2006. “Its value was that it was lawless,” says the writer Becky Cooper, who graduated from Stuy that same year and doesn’t remember ever eating any food at that Mcdonald’s. Uptown, from around 2013 to 2016, denizens of Murray Hill may recall a mostly finance-guy scene at the 33rd Street Mcdonald’s after a night at Bowery Electric or Phebe’s. “The Wolf of Wall Street had just come out,” says one former regular of that location. “It was all these kids who thought they were Gordon Gekko—rich kids in suits at the Mcdonald’s, pulling out their Blackberrys.”