From Prohibition-era speakeasies to the rum-heavy tiki drinks of the nineteen-thirties, fashions in cocktails are as cyclical as clothing trends or baby names; even the regrettable ones are liable to make a comeback. Earlier this month, restaurant critics issued a collective groan at the news that a new fern bar—Oleanders, in the McCarren Hotel & Pool in Williamsburg—had opened its doors in New York City for the first time in decades. Fern bars were the original preppy hangout, defined by their sugary drinks and faux-domestic interiors, including stained-glass lamps and potted plants. It is widely agreed that they marked an all-time low in bar décor, and in beverage quality; the New York restaurant critic Adam Platt describes them as “Laura Ashley rendered in culinary terms.” Nonetheless, these much maligned taverns hold a notable place in the annals of American cocktail history: they were the first drinking establishments in the country to cater specifically to single women.
When the world’s first fern bar opened its doors in New York City, in March of 1965, most co-ed drinking still took place in the home. At the height of cocktail culture, in the late nineteenth century, the United States had boasted one saloon for every two hundred and fifty people, but few respectable ladies ever frequented those establishments. Prohibition, passed in 1919, had upended mixology culture: nuanced Manhattans and Old-Fashioneds were replaced by drinks made with sugary mixers to mask the rough edges of moonshine. With the country’s male-dominated saloons and bars shuttered, social drinking became a largely domestic activity. By the time Prohibition was repealed, in 1933, and taverns and bars reopened their doors to serve their traditional male clientele, American men and women were accustomed to enjoying mixed drinks in mixed company—but only behind closed doors.
The revolutionary bar that brought the co-ed cocktail party outside of the home was none other than T.G.I. Friday’s—the original outpost of the international casual-dining chain. Its founder was a young perfume salesman named Alan Stillman, who lived on the Upper East Side and was interested in meeting single women. Stillman told me, in an interview first published on my blog, Edible Geography, that, at the time, the way to pick up girls was, naturally, to go to cocktail parties. “What would happen is that, on Wednesday and Thursday, you’d start collecting information—things like, ‘On Friday night at eight o’clock at 415 East Sixty-third Street, there’s going to be a great party run by three airline stewardesses,’ ” he said. “You built up a cocktail list and you bounced from one place to the other.”
At the time, the Upper East Side was filled with single people; the author Betsy Israel estimates, in “Bachelor Girl,” her 2002 history of single women in New York City in the twentieth century, that nearly eight hundred thousand of them lived on Manhattan’s East Side between Thirtieth and Ninetieth Streets during the nineteen-sixties. (According to Stillman, a building adjacent to what became the first T.G.I. Friday’s housed so many airline stewardesses that it was known as the “Stew Zoo.”) There was a bar next to Stillman’s apartment on First Avenue called the Good Tavern, but the single twenty-something women of the neighborhood never seemed to go there. It was a saloon—still stuck in the gender-segregated drinking culture of the nineteenth century, but without the high-quality cocktails. One night, in early 1965, Stillman was having a drink there after work when he suggested to the bartender that the place could be fixed up and turned into a singles bar. The bartender’s reaction, Stillman said, was, “Why don’t you do it?” Stillman borrowed five thousand dollars from his mother, took over the premises on a short-term lease, and began to redecorate, aiming to make the space welcoming to women.
His new place was brighter and cleaner than your average saloon, and dotted with familiar domestic flourishes: dainty bentwood chairs, framed photos, Tiffany lamps, and, of course, the signature ferns. Stillman painted the building light blue, and dressed the waitstaff in soccer shirts with red-and-white stripes (a pattern that was later adopted for T.G.I.’s logo). He had no background in either hospitality or interior design—“If you think that I knew what I was doing, you are dead wrong,” he told me. But T.G.I. Friday’s clicked. Almost immediately, Stillman had to hire a doorman to help manage the young people—young women!—who were standing in line outside on Friday nights, waiting to get in. Within eighteen months, two more fern bars had opened up on the same block. By the summer of 1965, the crowds going back and forth between these new, female-friendly bars had become an impediment to traffic, and police had to close First Avenue between Sixty-third and Sixty-fourth Streets on Friday nights, from eight P.M. until midnight.
By 1967, there was a second location of T.G.I. Friday’s, in Memphis, and other copycats were opening around the country, including Henry Africa’s, the San Francisco fern bar that is often (incorrectly) cited as the origin of the trend. Stillman told me to picture him during the fern bar’s heyday as Tom Cruise’s character in the 1988 movie “Cocktail, ” which was partially filmed in T.G.I’s Upper East Side location.
But if the fern bar was a step forward for women’s participation in public life, not to mention fuel to the fire of the sexual revolution, the drinks themselves represented a devolution. “The sixties were really the dark ages for mixology,” the cocktail historian David Wondrich told me. America’s drinking culture had never really recovered from Prohibition, and the fern bar’s patrons were, according to Wondrich, “not trained drinkers.” The menu consisted of easy-to-make mixed drinks that catered to unsophisticated palates by using creamy or sweet ingredients. The most popular was the Harvey Wallbanger—a Screwdriver with a float of Galliano on top, and a deliberately innuendo-laden name. “We made a ton of them,” said Stillman. “My God, how did we drink that crap?”
Stillman sold T.G.I. Friday’s in the early nineteen-seventies and, as the mini-chain grew, it migrated alongside the rest of middle-class America to the suburbs, where it became the family-friendly purveyor of loaded potato skins that it is today. By the nineteen-eighties, fern bars had fallen out of fashion, their place in popular culture taken by cocaine, Cosmopolitans, and Californian wine. (Stillman helped to popularize the last at his next big hit, Smith & Wollensky steak house.) Then, as Americans rediscovered both their palates and urban living in the new millennium**,** the craft-cocktail revival reintroduced many of the classic drinks of the nineteenth century.
But Joe Carroll, one of the restaurateurs behind Oleanders, thinks New Yorkers are ready to move on from the sorts of vintage drinks that have cycled back into fashion in recent years. Nineteenth-century cocktails, he told me, can be “medicinal, and not necessarily the most approachable”; the Oleanders menu, by contrast, advertises “colorful, simple cocktails ... to satisfy all.” Perhaps Williamsburg is ready for this vision of unabashed accessibility—a mixology version of normcore. Or perhaps even the lowliest chapters of American cocktail history can be remade to suit today’s sophisticated palates. Dale DeGroff, Oleanders’ master mixologist, told me that he has had to “upgrade” old recipes for fern-bar staples, like the Pink Squirrel and the Salty Dog, with premium ingredients, making them “a little more gourmet” for the modern drinker.
