The City That Never Sleeps Always Drinks

The City’s Health Department released a study showing that New Yorkers drink a lot:

It may not come as news to bartenders, waiters and sommeliers, but New Yorkers drink a lot, a new City Health Department study shows. But what may not be so obvious to those who pour for a living is that New Yorkers in some neighborhoods drink much more than those in others.

Care to guess which are the heaviest drinking neighborhoods? The results may or may not be surprising:

The study – based on information collected in 2003 as part of the city’s community health survey – suggests that the heaviest drinking neighborhoods are Greenwich Village and Chelsea, where 32 percent of adults report drinking amounts that the report defines as excessive, followed by the Upper East Side and Upper West Side and Gramercy Park in Manhattan, and Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope in Brooklyn.

Which goes to show that if you guessed that poorer neighborhoods drank more, you’d be wrong:

Residents of the South Bronx, the Northeast Bronx, Kingsbridge, Flatbush, Eastern Queens and Borough Park reported the least drinking.

Of course there were those who quibbled with the definition of “excessive” drinking. For the study’s purposes, “drinking excessively” constituted more than two drinks a day for a man and more than one drink a day for a woman:

In Park Slope yesterday, Jesse Howard, a bartender at the Gate, said that the definitions used by the Health Department classify just about everybody he knows as a problem drinker. “That sounds like a lot of Bloomberg” nonsense, Mr. Howard said, only he did not use the word nonsense. “New York’s that kind of town; it always has been. People go out.”

Mr. Howard, who wore a Slayer T-shirt and a red goatee, looked off into the distance. It was mid-afternoon, and the bluegrass harmonies of the Old Crow Medicine Show coming through the speakers sounded loud in the uncrowded room. Mr. Howard spoke up again, this time to clarify that his opinion was not colored by his professional experience.

“I’ve got friends who hate bars, and they still go home and have a cocktail,” Mr. Howard said. “People who have any social life in New York City go out and booze.”

Then there are those who argue that drinking to “excess” is part of the draw of New York:

At the White Horse Tavern in the West Village, most famous for serving the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas his last drink before he stumbled off and died on his way home, the study’s findings did not surprise Fran DeMastri, a bartender.

“I’d be shocked if it wasn’t true,” she said. “This area is a big tourist attraction. You have so many people coming from out of town. And there are so many bars in this neighborhood.”

Ms. DeMastri, who has been tending bar there for two and half years, said that people come into the bar to honor the fallen poet, not to practice temperance. “It’s a tavern atmosphere. There’s no reason that they would come here for one or two beers.”

Finally, from the department of “It took a study to tell you that?” there’s this shocking finding:

The study also found that men were more than twice as likely as women to drink to excess. And men who have never been married drink more than those with a spouse.

Uh, ya think?

See also: Scenes form City Bars.

Posted: January 22nd, 2005 | Filed under: Cultural-Anthropological

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