By Kati Neiheisel***Intrigued by NLE’s Who Was Who!, I want to know who was where. I want to know about the hot and happening clubs and piano bars of previous decades. Perhaps the past can inspire today’s New York City nightlife.
In The New York Times Magazine of September 11, 1988, Stephen Holden noted three 
recently opened cabaret rooms: Danny’s Skylight Room at 346 West 46th Street, Panache Encore at 318 West 45th Street, and Eighty-Eights at 228 West 10th Street. Eighty-Eights, owned by Erv Raible, Karen Miller, and Rochelle Seldin, became the center of the piano bar and cabaret universe from 1988-1999.
Prior to Eighty-Eights, Erv Raible had owned The Duplex at 55 Grove Street (1978-1984), Brandy’s Piano Bar at 235 East 84th Street (1980-1985) and Don’t Tell Mama at 343 West 46th Street (1982-1989) with his life partner Rob Hoskins, until Hoskins’ death from AIDS in 1984. Pianist Karen Miller and singing waitress Rochelle Seldin were the weekend team at The Duplex piano bar for 
many years. They were a Village tradition with a loyal following. Seldin says, “When Rob got sick, Erv sold The Duplex to two straight guys, Larry Schumel and Rick Panson. Of course, if we’d known about it, Karen and I would have bought the bar.
We’d been looking for a space to open a little piano bar. It was on the Q.T. since we were still working at The Duplex, but Erv got wind of it. He called and asked, ‘Do you want to do something with me?’ I said to Karen, ‘Yeah, baby, he knows how to book a cabaret room.’ Erv found the space on West 10th Street that was to have been the second location of Company Restaurant on Third Avenue, but restaurant owner Jeffrey Croland died from AIDS before they could open. His partner opened the space as Jupiter Cafe but it failed. Jeffrey’s father had been the co-signer so he got the lease and wanted to sell it.
The space was stunning, but downstairs, the piano bar was huge. It was so big, Karen said, ‘They won’t sing ‘Oklahoma’ in here.’ 
Upstairs was a gorgeous room, skylights and ceilings hand-stenciled with magnolias, but because of the size, we balked. Erv said, ‘Just think about it.’ After the weekend, Karen said, ‘Why won’t they sing ‘Oklahoma’ in here?’ So we renegotiated the lease and got the last 10 years of a 20 year sweetheart lease. The cabaret room upstairs seated 70 and the piano bar downstairs seated 100. The rent was $1800 a month. We made a deal with Jeffrey’s father to buy the fixtures and we didn’t say anything to anyone. We were still at the Duplex, even when we were signing the lease and getting the liquor license. One Saturday night, Rick cornered me and said, ‘Are you opening a bar?’ I said, ‘Karen and I need to move on.’ He said, ‘Well, you’re moving on tonight.’
Erv knew a lot of tricks to get us started like bringing staff in from other clubs, but everyone was mad at us. Some were mad because we didn’t take them with us, but we couldn’t leave the other clubs without staff. Some didn’t even come to opening night, but bit by bit, they trickled in. People would come and sing a song, and we’d say, ‘Do you bartend? Do you wait tables?’ Or we taught them! They were bread and butter jobs, so you could go to auditions, get a job, go away, come back when the job was over. You want to be on Broadway, great, you can make a living doing this. You want to do a cabaret show, you can build your audience by working at the club.”
According to Ruby Rims, “I opened the bar with Karen, Rochelle and Erv on April 7, 1988. I remember the date because that was also the code number to get in! I bartended at Eighty-Eights in the piano bar on Friday and Saturday nights with Mark Lindquist, who we called ‘Hazel.’ And I was the first drag queen to perform upstairs. Erv wanted to establish the room first, but I finally got to perform. A lot of great people performed up there: Sharon McNight, Nancy LaMott, Karen Mason, Helen Baldassare. The great thing that happened for me at Eighty-Eights was I made a lot of friends and I got to sing and work with Jason Robert Brown. 
It was one of the first places he worked in New York City.” While working in the piano bar at Eighty-Eights, Brown met Daisy Prince, his collaborator on what would become the musical revue Songs For a New World. Rim continues, “Jason wrote a song he used to sing called ‘I’m going to make it.’ When I tested positive for AIDS, I did a show upstairs called Ruby Rims: Positively Yours, and sang ‘I’m going to make it.’”
Lina Koutrakos recalls, “I’d been the manager at Don’t Tell Mama before Erv sold it. When he opened Eighty-Eights, Maggie Cullen was the bartender upstairs and I was the waitress and Erv’s assistant. I was working there five days a week. When I first discovered cabaret, I introduced myself to Erv and Rob at The Duplex. I told them I could sing and serve drinks so they hired me and booked me upstairs for my first cabaret 
show. Karen Mason and her pianist Brian Lasser arrived from Chicago and introduced me to their piano player friend Dick Gallagher, who became my exclusive pianist, arranger, best friend and soulmate. We’d been doing cabaret for about five years when someone found me and my bluesy voice and put me in Downtown Divas. I was singing with a huge rock and roll band at the Ritz, the Palladium, Studio 54. I was a kid kickin’ ass with a rock band, which is where I really live. I just wanted to sing.
Then, I’m working at Eighty-Eights and they book Vickie Sue Robinson. She packs in a full band, singing ‘Turn the Beat Around,’ but she’s also singing everything from rock and roll, cabaret, blues, original music and she is spectacular. She’s singing a song from Jesus Christ Superstar, ’Gethsemane,’ and I’m half jealous and half inspired. I couldn’t waitress ‘cause the goosebumps were so big. From that point on, I went back to rock and roll with a full band. Dick was an amazing arranger so when I sang rock, he did all my rock tunes. My first rock show was at Eighty-Eights. They did everything there from bands to Nancy LaMott and Christopher Marlowe doing the Great American Songbook, which became Nancy’s claim to fame.”
Actress-comedian Julie Halston remembers, “The era of Eighty-Eights for me was the era of Billy Stritch, Jim Caruso, Ann Hampton Callaway, Sally Mayes, Lina Koutrakos—the regulars, although there were many more. I strangely got involved with Eighty-Eights through Charles Busch. In 1989, 
Charles and I were in LA doing his play Vampire Lesbians of Sodom. I was always entertaining in the dressing room so Charles said, ‘You should do a one-woman show.’ I said, ‘It’s too intimidating, I can’t do that!’ When we got back to New York, unbeknownst to me, Charles asked Erv to book me for one night. Erv said, ‘Does she even have an act?’ Charles said, ‘She will after I talk to her. Just book her and we’ll get people there.’ I had two weeks to come up with an act! Charles said, ‘Call your mother and write down everything she says. That will give you a start.’
And I did! I put together a 42-minute show called I’ll Be the Judge of That. It was just me spouting my mother’s opinions and my opinions. Wayman Wong wrote about it in The Daily News and it took off! I became immersed in cabaret. Erv and I became friends and I started dating my husband, Ralph Howard. He worked for 1010 WINS , but also had a radio show on weekends where he did entertainment reports. He interviewed me 
and I ended up marrying him! My life totally changed through the cabaret world. I got to know all these incredible people, including Julie Wilson and Margaret Whiting. Having a cabaret act was so helpful to me in my theater career. I learned how to connect with an audience through cabaret. And it was fun. It was my home away from home.”
Chip Deffaa wrote in The New York Post, “The city’s most joyous piano-bar scene: Eighty-Eights on Saturday night, when pianist-singer Karen Miller presides over a Broadway/Hollywood song fest. The vibe she creates as she coaxes to the mic various singers—pros and amateurs alike—makes every Saturday feel like New Year’s Eve.” The piano bar had a 4:00 happy hour. Two or three people, called “Miller Specials” by the staff, would have one or two drinks and sit at a table all night long. The cabaret crowd would arrive at 7:30 for the 8:00 show, followed by an 11:00 show. The piano bar started at 9:30, but would take a break when shows were starting. Seldin adds, “Liza Minnelli was a regular at the piano bar. She’d sit down and ask, ‘Where’s Terri White?’
Sometimes, we’d say, ‘She’s working at The Duplex,’ then Liza would ask, ‘Can she come over?’ Liza walked in one night with two 
friends: Shirley McLaine and Bella Abzug. Chita Rivera would come to see a show and one of our guys would descend the staircase doing ‘All that Jazz.’ I remember Chita, Joel Grey and Lauren Bacall going upstairs to hear Michael Feinstein at his 11:00 show, and Barbara Cook coming to hear her son sing at his 5:00 show. When we opened the room it was Karen Mason, Lois Sage…Varla Jean Merman did a 1:00 in the morning show, Coco Peru did a 1:00 in the morning show. Marta Sanders was one of the first who did a brunch show with us. Sometimes we did four shows a day. Last call came at a quarter to 4:00 in the morning. That doesn’t mean anybody stopped. We’d lock the doors and keep going. We couldn’t sell drinks but we didn’t have to stop singing. And we were all iron lungs back then. People came from everywhere—the Met Opera Chorus, Andrew Lloyd Weber…”
Lighting-sound designer Matt Berman recalls, “Karen and Rochelle had their fingers on the pulse of the piano bar, as Erv did on the cabaret. They were a brilliant team. They were all about the performer, not the owners or staff. Erv’s model was to nurture 
performers and allow the audience to build. At one point, I wanted to have a cyclorama, a big white wall that could change color. It didn’t exist in cabaret at that time but I had been doing theater. I requested special lighting and they said, ‘get us a price and we’ll save up the money.’ I didn’t think this would really happen since most owners think, ‘why add things to a room that’s doing well,’ but 6 months later they came to me and said, ‘We got the money.’ That’s where they were coming from.
It was an amazing launch pad. The musical revue Closer Than Ever started there. The Richard Maltby, Jr. and David Shire musical revue started at Eighty-Eights as a one-act revue entitled Next Time Now! As a producer you had no overhead. You had a premade theater with sound and lighting and a person to run them. There were a lot of revues — Cy Coleman [A Collective Cy], Martin Charnin [Loose Lips; Here’s to Our Friends], Mary Rodgers [Hey, Love: The Songs of Mary Rodgers]. I did five thousand shows at Eighty-Eights from 1989 until it closed in 1999 at the end of its 10 year lease. 
The piano bar made the money to keep the cabaret going and the cabaret kept the name in the papers to feed the piano bar, but by 1999 the Village was hot again and the rent jumped. It was unsustainable.
Seldin adds, “I left at the very end when the 10 year lease was up. The rent went from $2,200 to $22,000 a month. We didn’t know what to do. We had a customer with money who was into real estate so we approached him and he bought 51% of our company. He wanted to open other Eighty-Eights around the country. In the beginning, it sounded like a good deal. Then he decided he didn’t want me to wait tables. Then he wanted to move Karen off weekends, but that was Karen’s crowd. If she wasn’t at the piano, they walked out.” Eighty-Eights officially closed on May 30, 1999. “The current owners of the space say people are still looking for us, decades later.
We lived in the golden era. Everyone got to be who they were and got to do their thing, upstairs and down. It was the center of the universe in the Village. We all knew each other, and it was a family, honest and true. If I had the money, I’d do it again. Everyone deserves a place like that.”
