REAL ESTATE
Where the
CLUB KIDS live When Erin Hawker moved into an old sewing machine factory on W37th Street, she needed a bodyguard just to get to her apartment …
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Words Ruth Walker Photographs Eva Mueller
he people in this room go back. Way back. Even before we start shooting, Erin Hawker and photographer Eva Mueller work out that they both used to live on the same block in Hell’s Kitchen in the late 1990s. They reminisce over the rooftop parties, the crazy neighbors, the changes that caused Eva to move up to the 40s then, eventually, to Brooklyn, and Erin to lose her Hudson River views. “I was a really big club kid,” says Erin. “Clubbing was a huge, integral part of New York and it’s really what made it the city it is – that freedom of expression. I grew up in Wisconsin and this was the epitome of going out and letting your hair loose. It was wild!” It was in those clubs that Erin, owner and founder of Agentry PR, fashion industry insider, and the brain behind New York Men’s Day, met our creative director, Mykel C Smith. So, you see, the team has a lot of catching up to do. There was Vinyl in Tribeca, remember? The Tunnel and The Sound Factory. Limelight. Save The Robots in the East Village. “It would only get started at around 7am,” says Erin. “It was crazy. “Then there would be these afterhours clubs in people’s apartments. And there was this whole weird scene of underground casinos. They moved around the city, in random office buildings. There’d be people outside the clubs with pamphlets, or if you got chosen you’d be given an address and you’d just go. Literally, you walked into the basement of this office building – a functioning office building – and there’d be roulette tables, there’d be blackjack.
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“We’ve got somebody who was a porno illustrator, an Academy Award-winning set designer, an Academy Awardwinning director, a lot of artists … then just some crazies.” It was definitely part of the drug culture, let’s be honest – it had to have been. There was definitely this shady, seedy, underground scene.” Then she met a guy. “It always starts with meeting a guy!” she laughs. (The guy, by the way, is film producer Jon Furay, and he’s now her husband.) “He lived in Hell’s Kitchen, on W37th St between 8th and 9th Ave, but the neighborhood was so different then. It was really unsafe. I would have to call him from a payphone when I got out of the taxi for him to come down and get me. Literally, I would be coming back from the clubs, 2am or 3am, and he would come down.” They still live in that apartment, on the seventh floor of an old sewing machine factory – all open-plan, bare floorboards, and, a salute to Erin’s clubbing days, a giant disco ball hanging from the ceiling. “When we moved in there was graffiti
DIGITAL EDITION
Opposite: Erin and her husband, film producer Jon Furay, at home in Hell’s Kitchen.
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