Quote:
Originally Posted by dc_denizen
the real question, why is there a TGIF Fridays on Fifth avenue just south of Rockefeller center?
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Time, of course, marches on, but I thought the following quote (too long, I'm sorry) from Wikipedia regarding TGIF history was worth posting. It was the first singles bar back in the day:
Alan Stillman opened the first T.G.I. Friday's restaurant in 1965 in New York. He lived in a neighborhood with many airline stewardesses, fashion models, secretaries, and other young, single people on the East Side of Manhattan near the Queensboro Bridge, and hoped that opening a bar would help him meet women. At the time, Stillman's choices for socializing were non-public cocktail parties or "guys' beer-drinking hangout" bars that women usually did not visit; he recalled that "there was no public place for people between, say, twenty-three to thirty-seven years old, to meet." He sought to recreate the comfortable cocktail-party atmosphere in public despite having no experience in the restaurant business.[4][5]
With $5,000 of his own money and $5,000 borrowed from his mother,[4] Stillman purchased a bar he often visited, The Good Tavern at the corner of 63rd Street and First Avenue, and renamed it T.G.I. Friday's after the expression "Thank God! It's Friday!" from his years at Bucknell University.[6][7] The new restaurant, which opened on March 15, 1965, served standard American cuisine, bar food, and alcoholic beverages,[5] but emphasized food quality and preparation.[6] The exterior featured a red-and-white striped awning and blue paint, the Gay Nineties interior included fake Tiffany lamps,[5] wooden floors, Bentwood chairs, and striped tablecloths, and the bar area added brass rails and stained glass. The employees were young and wore red-and-white striped soccer shirts,[6] and every time someone had a birthday, the entire restaurant crew came around with a cake and sang Friday's traditional birthday song. The first location closed in 1994[4] and is now a British pub called "Baker Street"; the brass rails are still there.
Although Malachy McCourt's nearby eponymous bar preceded T.G.I. Friday's[8] and Stillman credited the media for creating the term, he had unintentionally created one of the first singles bars. It benefited from the near-simultaneous availability of the birth-control pill and Betty Friedan's book The Feminine Mystique:[6][4][5]
I don’t think there was anything else like it at the time. Before T.G.I. Friday’s, four single twenty-five year-old girls were not going out on Friday nights, in public and with each other, to have a good time. They went to people’s apartments for cocktail parties or they might go to a real restaurant for a date or for somebody’s birthday, but they weren’t going out with each other to a bar for a casual dinner and drinks because there was no such place for them to go.[5]
T.G.I. Friday's was one of the first to use promotions such as ladies' night,[6] and Stillman achieved his hopes of meeting women; "Have you seen the movie Cocktail? Tom Cruise played me!...Why do girls want to date the bartender? To this day, I’m not sure that I get it."[5] He and the restaurant benefited from its location—according to Stillman, 480 stewardesses lived in the apartment building next door[4]—and received publicity in national magazines. T.G.I. Friday's became so popular that it had to install ropes to create an area for those waiting in line, also unusual at the time for a restaurant. A competitor, Maxwell's Plum, opened across the street, and others soon followed.[5]
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