On the Town

On New York's First Avenue "strip"--running from about 59th Street up to 86th --you can tell a great deal about someone just by which bar he enters. The median age of the crowd at each bar, for example, climbs steadily as you move up the avenue, beginning with the teeny-boppers at 59th, the low-20s at 64th, the around-30s at about 75th, and so on. You can also find bars catering to singles, swinging marrieds, divorcees or homosexuals, to stewardesses, nurses and interns, jocks, cinema buffs, admen, interracial couples, pseudo sophisticates, the literary or the arty crowd. Since the bars change ownership and sales pitches faster than women's fashions, they offer a continuously changing spectrum of social intercourse --often followed by sexual.

By no means unique, the strip offers in relatively pure form many of the elements that will characterize much of our leisure-time activities and facilities on the town during this decade and beyond: a high degree of specialization and narrowly focused appeal to a particular clientele; a widely varied multiplicity of establishments offering the consumer a much broader choice of recreation than he has had in the past; and, frequently, a concentration of these facilities in relatively small, well-defined areas.

"People have a desire to be with people like themselves," says Malcolm D. Rivkin, a Washington-based urban planner. This is reflected not only in the highly specialized bars but in residential patterns such as communities designed specifically for young singles, the retired and elderly or young swinging marrieds. By zeroing in on a particular group, Rivkin explains, a bar owner or restaurateur can provide superior service with far greater efficiency. He can tailor his offering to the needs and desires of that group and not worry about having to create a broad-based appeal. The nation's growing population now makes this approach economically feasible by providing sufficiently large numbers of people in these narrow groups to support specialized establishments.

Agreement on the prospects of recreational specialization extends even to the heretofore mass-cult movie industry. Among a growing group of West Coast moviemakers encouraging this new trend is San Franciscan Bill Bushnell. The former managing director of the American Conservatory Theater, Bushnell, with his four partners, now heads a Seventies-style motion-picture company that is presently at work on several films. It's his belief that today's young audiences are far more sophisticated and demanding than their parents. They will no longer be satisfied by the old Hollywood formula that attempts to give something to everyone and offend no one. Moviemakers of the Seventies, Bushnell and others say, will take a different approach. First, by adopting the cinéma vérité technique, shooting almost exclusively on location and not worrying about less-than-perfect lighting, etc., they eliminate the monstrous costs of constructing and maintaining the sets and sound stages that brought many of Hollywood's major studios to near financial ruin. Second, by using young, relatively unknown actors, the new moviemakers avoid the other Hollywood pitfall--the fantastic salaries demanded by big-name stars. Freed from these high-overhead economics, the new moviemakers are already producing films on budgets as low as $800,000, which make it possible to turn a profit on movies that appeal to a narrow population group and allow them to deal in depth with virtually any subject of importance and make meaningful, personal statements about it.

This new latitude is beginning to spearhead the recovery of the movie industry. "We don't need gimmicks to bring audiences into the theaters," says one moviemaker. "What we need is good scripts and good screenplays. If we put a good story on the screen, the audiences will come to see it." Producers agree that there are also likely to be many more movies made in the Seventies, both good and bad, than in past decades. Because of the low budgets and the dispersion of the industry, a number of untalented semi-amateurs are likely to enter the field; but, at the same time, more talented film makers will be offering moviegoers a better selection of superior films. Like the First Avenue bar-hoppers, moviegoers in the Seventies may look forward to a much wider choice than they had before of offerings that have been carefully tailored to the tastes of one or another group.

Also like the bar-hoppers, they may find their choices centered on a relatively small, well-defined geographical area, according to Gordon Stulberg, president of Cinema Center Films in Los Angeles. A number of movie exhibitors, he says, are experimenting with so-called minitheater complexes, in which a single building houses as many as six separate theaters, each somewhat smaller than traditional moviehouses, in recognition of the limited appeal of the new special-interest film fare. In some of the complexes now under construction, says Stulberg, the minitheaters are arranged around a central projection booth, so that one or two projectionists (continued on page 150)On the Town(continued from page 144) can operate four projectors showing four movies in four theaters at the same time.

Concentration in theater districts is traditional for the legitimate theater, but these districts may be dying, according to impresario David Merrick. Since it's not unusual for six or more Merrick. hits to be playing on Broadway at one time, such pessimism about the future of Broadway theater must be taken seriously. Asked what he might be producing on Broadway in 1980, Merrick. said he didn't know whether there would be a Broadway theater in 1980. Inflation is killing Broadway, says Merrick. Costs of production have doubled since he opened Hello, Dolly! six years ago, and they aren't susceptible to much pruning, even with more reasonable agreements with the stage unions. As a result, he admits, ticket prices are too high. They are becoming a luxury that most people can no longer afford. But he is unable to charge less. Furthermore, it's getting more and more difficult to attract the money needed to back new plays.

Merrick is also distressed by the lack of good new plays and good new talent coming into the Broadway theater today. "Broadway doesn't generate the same excitement and glamor it once did," he says. "It no longer grabs people in the same way." As a result, potential playwrights are no longer attracted to Broadway and they go into other fields. Merrick sees no hope for a theatrical resurgence in most of the theatrical experiments now in progress. Theater in the round has existed for a long time and has been a relative failure. Audiences don't like to have the actors so close to them, says Merrick. And he thinks stage nudism is merely a passing fad and that the new participatory theater--in which the patrons become a part of the show--has aroused strenuous objections among many audiences.

Merrick is equally pessimistic about the off-Broadway and regional theaters. They have lower costs, sketchy sets, cheaper actors and are consequently often amateurish and bad; for these reasons, they have an even higher failure rate than Broadway. All of which may explain why Merrick plans to abandon the theater and turn his energies to movie production. But not everyone, fortunately, feels as he does about the theater. While acknowledging the difficult money problems and a current but perhaps temporary shortage of good new material for Broadway, drama critic Elliot Norton predicts that the theater will shrink for a while, with fewer plays being produced, but that it will come back strong eventually--as it has in the past.

If the future of the legitimate theater looks bleak, at least for the next few years, the current trend to specialization could provide the key to a resurgence in the even more depressed night-club industry. Enrico Banducci, owner of San Francisco's now-defunct hungry i, says the days of the big, lavish general-audience clubs are over except in a very few tourist centers, such as Las Vegas and Miami. They will be replaced, he predicts, by many small intime clubs catering to special groups. The old clubs, he says, were based on principles and conditions prevalent during the days of Prohibition and just after, when audiences could be pulled in merely by offering liquor service, big-name entertainment and lots of pretty girls. To get all that, audiences were even willing to accept generally mediocre food at excessively high prices. This kind of club is no longer possible in most cities, says Banducci, since audiences today can get liquor and better food at home and big-name entertainment on television.

Night clubs in the Seventies, Banducci predicts, will be able to provide the better food, service and entertainment demanded by today's audiences by catering to particular groups whose tastes can be clearly identified and whose pocketbooks can support those tastes and the clubs that satisfy them. He also predicts the emergence of the so-called compartmentalized night club, similar in many ways to today's Playboy Clubs. Instead of a single big room, the club would consist of a series of small rooms, each devoted to a different function. One room might offer quality dining without distraction; another, dancing; and a third, entertainment.

Night-club entertainment in the Seventies, Banducci believes, is likely to be dominated by young comedians making serious social comment. Freed from the limitations of having to satisfy a broad-based audience with varied sensibilities, they will be able to probe deeply into the issues of the day without fearing that they will offend or alienate any significant segment of the public. People will select their night clubs not only because of the quality of the food, drink and atmosphere offered but also on the basis of the social and political views held by the crowd to which the club caters.

Most on-the-town activities in this decade--theater in particular--are likely to get a healthy boost from the restaurant industry, according to Richard Blumen-thal of Restaurant Associates Industries. All entertainment activities today, including restaurant dining, suffer from a number of annoying problems associated with parking and transportation from one activity to another, but Blumenthal reports that many restaurateurs are considering "packaging experiences." This could be achieved either by offering two activities in the same place, such as dinner with theater, or by providing dinner, transportation and theater as a complete package for the customer. A number of establishments already are offering dinner-theater packages, including a New York restaurant that transfers its diners to the theater by special bus and a Washington restaurant that presents complete Broadway musicals, such as the venerable South Pacific, right on the premises. Another activity that is or will be offered with dinner is shopping. In Los Angeles and elsewhere, a number of restaurants have made arrangements with high-fashion women's stores to present fashion shows during the lunch periods. In addition to entertaining the diners, the models often present a short sales spiel and are prepared to take orders for the clothing on the spot. In New York, Blumenthal reports, at least one restaurant is working out a deal with a number of Fifth Avenue stores whereby women having lunch could make arrangements, via courtesy telephones at the tables, to be picked up at the restaurant, transported to the store and taken on tours of the store's departments by hostesses. In the sense that night clubs package experiences in this way, Blumenthal seconds Banducci's prediction that night clubs may also enjoy a resurgence.

Just as in other leisure activities, restaurants, too, will follow the trend toward concentration and multiplicity. So-called restaurant rows--small areas, such as Los Angeles' Sepulveda Boulevard, in which many restaurants are concentrated --make sense for the industry, says Blumenthal. In such a district, one could expect to find associated services needed by the diner, such as parking lots and taxi stands. In fact, in any new construction or urban renewal, they could be planned into the project. As an illustration, he cited his company's three restaurants in New York's Pan Am Building: Zum Zum, a fast-service establishment, Trattoria for informal dining and Charlie Brown's for more serious, formal dining. A parking garage is available in the building; taxi stands are right outside; the Broadway theater district and the Fifth Avenue shops are within walking distance; and Grand Central Station, from which suburbanites can arrive and depart, lies directly below via escalators.

Restaurants are also likely to become more specialized in their offerings and appeals. In addition to the public's increasing sophistication about various exotic cuisines, a growing scarcity of trade personnel--chefs, bakers, waiters, et al.-- is forcing the emergence of a new, informal type of restaurant in which diners participate in the preparation and/or service of their meals. The industry has failed to attract young people, despite (continued on page 294)On the Town(continued from page 150) salaries ranging up to .$50,000 a year for headwaiters and top chefs. And as the European economy has boomed, Europe has dried up as a supply of restaurant people. The result is that the clientele will have to help themselves.

One restaurant, Blumenthal speculates, might have its customers put together their own appetizers from an anti-pasto buffet. A number of restaurants that now permit diners to pick out their own live lobsters or their steaks might go a step further and allow customers to cook them at the table on hot. plates or hibachis. At least one California restaurant now has its customers make their own salads. In family establishments, service requirements could be reduced by having the head of the table serve the food and possibly even carve the roast. And one New York restaurant is experimenting with allowing customers to mix their own drinks at the table, leaving the bottles there and figuring out later how much was used.

Problems in another industry--banking--also are likely to make dining out (as well as other on-the-town activities) more convenient, says Louis F. Reale, president of Riggs Computer Center and a vice-president of Riggs National Bank in Washington, D. C. The nation's banks are rapidly sinking into a morass of paper that is costing tens of billions of dollars a year to process, and the credit-card society has only added to the paper deluge from the transfer of money. To solve the problem, Reale reports that the banking industry is looking to the computer for electronic money transfer. A person's money would exist almost entirely as an electronic signal on a magnetic tape and would be transferred from employer to employee, from consumer to store, from bank to bank, by computers communicating with computers. Yet the new system wouldn't entirely eliminate the need for real money, Reale notes. For example, the on-the-town reveler might find that offering an electronic credit card to a New York cabby is hazardous to his health. The computer plus a money system, therefore, might mean taking along enough pocket money for such minor goods and services and paying for higher-priced items by direct electronic transfer of funds from his bank account to whatever establishments he patronizes. Besides eliminating the need to carry a lot of money, this also would end the embarrassment at finding himself short of cash during an evening on the town.

When fully developed and implemented, such a system could obviously handle many other leisure-oriented services. Reale sees no significant obstacles to utilizing a nationwide computer-based money-transfer system to handle reservations and tickets for plays, concerts, restaurants, sporting events and associated services. Suppose, for example, you were planning to drive into town from the suburbs for a dinner-and-theater evening. A single telephone call to the computer center might accomplish the following: estimate times for dinner and travel to the theater based on accumulated data on conditions in the restaurant and theater areas, reserve a parking space near the restaurant, book a table at the restaurant and preorder dinner, if desired, recommend transportation between the restaurant and the theater, reserve seats in the theater, provide any other details--and automatically pay for everything electronically. Not only would the planning, preparation and payment for an evening on the town be made much easier but it also might eliminate such problems as parking at one's destination or colossal traffic jams in the theater district.

Since a central data bank would know how many reservations it had made for each facility on a particular evening, it might be able to regulate the flow of people in a smoother, more efficient manner than the current unorganized system, in which each establishment takes reservations without considering what's going on next door. The computer, for example, might advise the client that although a table is open at his favorite restaurant, the nearest available parking space is seven blocks away. It might further suggest either alternative restaurants of the same type or another mode of transportation into town.

While such a system is a logical application of computer technology and a distinct future possibility, Reale says not to look for it tomorrow. The capital investment required to establish such a system would be enormous. Secondly, several recent attempts to establish far more limited, computer-based nationwide reservations and ticketing networks for major theatrical and sporting events have failed miserably, with accompanying major financial losses to the backers. Reale doesn't visualize the complete system in operation during this decade, but parts of it may begin to appear soon. Airline and hotel reservations are already computerized to a large extent. A limited number of companies already are paying their employees by transferring their salaries directly into their bank accounts. Such developments are likely to become more widespread in the next two years.

A major breakthrough will occur with the development of low-cost electronic terminal equipment that can connect banks directly with the points of sale, possibly via telephone wires. When this occurs, Reale explains, a store or a restaurant could instantaneously verify a customer's ability to pay and could effect an immediate transfer of money from the customer's account to its own at the moment of purchase, all without the use of any currency. As the system developed, computers could take over other financial transactions, such as bill paying (already in limited use), budgeting and financial planning and tax computation and filing. To arrive at this point, however, banks would have to reach nationwide agreement on compatible electronic equipment and Federal legislation would probably be required to protect consumers against invasion of privacy. Credit reporting by bank computers, for example, would most likely be prohibited. Other problems arise in securing fraud-proof identification. One leading method under development is identification by a person's voice print--the individual electronic pattern a person's voice makes on an oscilloscopelike instrument. As the problems are solved and the system proliferates, another on-the-town annoyance --the need to handle money for everything--will for the most part be removed.

The annoyances and problems of transportation are likely to remain with us, although some improvements are at least possible. The difficulty lies in the very nature of transportation: To effect an improvement, even a small one, it must occur throughout the system. In other words, a milelong stretch of six-lane highway isn't likely to move a person very fast if a two-lane road lies at either end. Furthermore, even a minuscule improvement in a transportation system generally requires billions of dollars and many years to achieve.

Some improvement can be made, however, not by increasing the capacity of the transportation system but by decreasing the demand. That is, reduce the amount of travel required to bring the leisure activity and the consumer together. This is precisely what the concentration of entertainment facilities into small areas, such as the restaurant rows, attempts to do. By further concentrating activity areas, such as restaurants, bars, night clubs and theaters, into closely adjacent or mixed entertainment districts, the demand for transportation will be sharply reduced. Then, if a major transportation facility, such as New York's Grand Central Station, with its complex of commuter trains, subways, buses, taxi stands and parking lot, is incorporated into an entertainment district, the transportation problem will diminish even further.

Outside the big cities, a similar concentration process is occurring on a small scale in many suburban shopping centers and in the new towns that are beginning to crop up around the country. In these areas, planners are attempting to group entertainment facilities around and within shopping malls, or walking plazas, that allow patrons to walk from one place to another after parking in a centrally located lot or after debarking from a bus. These centers are likely to offer increasingly high-quality entertainment attractions, says planner Malcolm Rivkin, as the developers realize that entertainment serves as the primary attraction to bring people and their money into the center from outside the immediate area. Rivkin predicts that such centers, and particularly the new towns, will engage in sharp competition for the outsider's dollar through a progressive upgrading and diversification of entertainment facilities, since it is one of the very few areas in which they can compete. As the process continues, people in the suburbs will go into the cities only for the more exotic entertainment that cannot generate sufficient support within the smaller geographical areas served by the suburban centers.

Both in the cities and in the larger suburban centers, many people are already participating in a relatively new diversion --university-level adult education. More and more adults are using universities for their traditional purpose--learning. In fact, a significant trend is developing as numerous educational institutions are converting from 8- to 16-hour workdays in response to the burgeoning demand by adults to go back to school to study everything from theater appreciation to basket weaving and astrophysics.

Many sociologists attribute this trend, at least in part, to a predictable reaction against television watching. They note that the television industry has grown from an $8,700,000 midget in 1948 to a two-billion-dollar giant that dominates today's family entertainment and, according to some estimates, occupies almost six hours a day of the American family's time. Much of this spectacular growth, they say, was derived from the newness of the medium, its relatively low cost and the convenience of staying home--charms that are rapidly wearing thin. Now, say the sociologists, people are becoming increasingly critical of the quality of television programing and are reacting against the total passivity of TV watching. Moreover, despite a number of projected improvements in home fare and electronic techniques, the need to do something active remains a powerful force in moving people out of their homes in search of other activities.

An almost unprecedented art boom, for example, is under way. The number of art schools in Los Angeles alone has climbed from 50 to 350 in just the past several years. Across the street from one gallery on Los Angeles' growing La Cie- nega art strip, a parking lot, formerly filled with cars, is now populated by a mob of amateur artists sitting on folding chairs amid a multicolored sea of canvases that they are offering for sale. So many amateur artists desire and are willing to pay for space in which to display their work that many parking-lot operators have found it more profitable to rent a few square feet to these artists than to drivers.

Just as art is booming, so is almost everything else even vaguely associated with culture. Amateur theatrical groups, opera societies, ballet companies, book clubs, even organizations devoted to the revival of ancient sports, are springing up all over the country. Both New York and California have croquet leagues in operation. The sport of falconry is being revived. Professional soccer leagues are bidding for national acceptance. And a number of lesser-known sports, such as lacrosse, rugby, judo and fencing, are developing substantial followings through a growing number of amateur clubs in major metropolitan areas. Among such outdoor activities, boating as a sport on city or nearby waterways has experienced an almost unprecedented boom. Indeed, many marinas and waterways, jammed with an estimated 8,600,000 boats, are coming to resemble urban freeways complete with traffic jams.

For those leisure seekers of a more subdued nature, gourmet and winetast-ing clubs are gaining in both number and membership. Many of them host special dinners or winetasting sessions either in selected restaurants or in one another's homes. It need not be an expensive hobby. One club staged a wine-tasting devoted to inexpensive domestic vintages. The idea was simply to pick the best wine of the group, even though the choice was restricted to those costing less than two dollars a bottle. Clubs devoted to gourmet food may put on a dinner once a month at each member's home in rotation. Thus, if 12 couples belong to the club, each one may give a dinner once a year. Or the club may decide to break up the routine by having its monthly dinner in a restaurant several limes a year.

As most of us know, even pure sex has become a club affair--a trend that is likely to become even more widespread before 1980, according to some social scientists. Informal date- and mate-swapping clubs exist in virtually every major city in the nation. The process has been formalized in some cities where bars and night clubs openly dedicated to partner swapping have sprung up. Some Southern California nudist camps, normally devoted to sun worship and the like, have been staging a special "swingers' night" once or twice a week. The latest organized sex club devotes its efforts to full-fledged orgies involving as many as 30 or 40 participants playing together in various forms of group sex. According to some observers, there are now orgy clubs in every major U. S. city.

You may find that none of the leisure activities of the Seventies suit your libido or life style. But it's not likely. The primary fuel that has already boomed the leisure market into today's 150-bilIion-dollar industry is the unprecedented amount of time and money Americans have to spend. For perhaps the first time in history, the great mass of Americans can afford to devote a significant portion of their lives to the pursuit of pure pleasure. In earlier times, unless you were a member of the wealthy and privileged class, you wouldn't have been concerned about the problem--because you simply wouldn't have had enough free time to spend thinking about it, let alone the funds to spend filling it. All that, fortunately, has changed for most of us, and the leisure industry intends to provide you with an increasingly large and varied array of leisure-time options tailored to your tastes and needs. If you can't find something worth while to do among all that's being planned for your pleasure, of course, you can always get a second job.