The Stark's Crowd

cashier's desk Stark's Restaurant (Gottscho-Schliesner, Inc., photographer, Library of Congress)

Back in the 60’s there was a restaurant called Stark’s located on the Southeast corner of Madison and 78^th. It was the kind of place that attracted well-to-do housewives at lunch and in the evenings was a hangout low achievers, who attended  private school and were mostly interested in superficial things like money and clothes. It’s safe to say that few kids who hung out at Stark’s amounted to much (though there were undoubtedly exceptions) and the restaurant wasn’t any help. It offered the French fries and other goodies that kids liked in the context of elegant and obsequious service, on the part of the staff. You might have termed these kids the fast crowd, but they were more indolent than rebellious or precociously sexual and most of the girls and guys would do a good job in preserving their virginity even into the early years of their loveless marriages. It would be nice to say that the Upper East Side was a different place back in that era, but actually it was the same  as it is today, quiet at night and forbidding, with the gates to the local white brick palaces firmly guarded by doormen whose uniforms were often comprised of white gloves and mourning jackets. Most of the kids who went to Starks were mini spoiled adults by the time they were 15. Stark's was the perfect training ground for a life of entitlement. While these scions of wealth hadn’t earned any money or distinguished themselves in any way, they displayed all the xenophobia and social status of a landed class. The heavily made up young girls had already spent a good part of their lives at their local HD (hairdresser) and probably couldn’t remember seeing what their nails looked like in their natural unmanicured state. The boys, who tended not to go out for teams or sports, spoke with an air of avuncular certainty, with most of their observations based on experiences which they’d neither had nor were likely to have. Most of the Stark’s crowd would barely make it through college (the gentlemen's "C" was fashionable in those days) and go on to spend the rest of their lives playing golf in Westchester.