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I spent so much time there - sitting on a red vinyl stool at the bar, wondering if the Cîroc poster on the wall was really signed by Diddy, swapping turns on the jukebox with the bartender who liked aughts R&B even more than I did - it was my house equivalent. So even though it committed all four of the cardinal sins a bar can (charging a cover on weekends, overcharging for a Bud Heavy, failing to have a beer-shot special, shutting down to become condos), I still loved it anyway. It was even a place to divert packages for those who lived on the same block and spent more time there than in their own living rooms. every day for anyone who needed a drink before or after a show at BAM or a sweaty dance party, for a grown-up and sexy Saturday night, or, with its good lighting and stacked digital jukebox, a decent spot for a first date. Call it a dive bar, and your tongue will blacken and fall out of your mouth. If I’d had a house, not an apartment with a bad party layout, I would have just had a house party, but instead I opted to host people at Frank’s.įrank’s Cocktail Lounge was a little worn but always clean, never mysteriously sticky. And then, the week of my birthday, I regretted it. I kept telling friends I was excited to “really just celebrate solo” because I was “over big birthday parties.” Nobody believed me. As told to Justin Curtoįor some reason, the year I turned 32, I said to myself, Fuck parties, and booked a birthday flight out of town. So we did that event without knowing it would be our last. By the time the next Tuesday came, the city had issued a shutdown order. I started having people contact me asking that I cancel my events to try to avoid spreading the virus. You could tell already that it was a little slower we probably had 225 people. March 10 was the last Tuesday we played the Copa. It was a combination of the old-school crowd that has been going to the Copa on Tuesdays for 30 years and my crowd, which was mostly people in their 20s and 30s. We only played a little bit of bachata - it was almost everything salsa and nothing else. It was probably the best dance floor in New York. All the floors were wood, well waxed, clean. I was incredibly humbled every time I walked inside, thinking that a kid from Argentina could end up DJ-ing here. It’s a big corner building with the name written in huge red letters in the windows. Everybody knows there’s a club in New York called the Copacabana.