Live, From Tribeca! A neon-lit promise of excitement on Tribeca's then dark streets, the Odeon was the restaurant that defined New York's 80s: a retro haven for the likes of Warhol and Basquiat, De Niro and Belushi, with a cocaine-fueled scene captured in Bright Lights, Big City.(Panel Discussion)

Byline: Frank Digiacomo

In Lower Manhattan, at the corner of West Broadway and Thomas Street, hangs a restaurant sign that functions as a kind of cultural Rorschach test. Composed not of abstract shapes but of 29-inch-high stylishly retro letters that spell the words cafeteria and the odeon in reddish-orange neon, the sign represents different things to different people. For some, it is an Edward Hopper painting come to life. Others recognize it as an image from the opening credits of vintage Saturday Night Live reruns or the cover of Jay McInerney's novel Bright Lights, Big City. Others see it simply as a restaurant sign.

But for some who lived in Manhattan as the 1970s gave way to the 80s, the Odeon sign was a homing beacon that signaled a new chapter in New York's nightlife. Indeed, by the time the Odeon opened in the fall of 1980, Studio 54, that sybaritic symbol of the previous decade, had already begun to recede along with the financial crisis that had fueled the disco's anything-goes atmosphere. Shirts would soon be buttoned to the neck instead of opened to the navel. The once untamable city was acquiring a crust of civilization, order, and even romance. Prosperity and opportunity had returned-and the city's nightlife would begin to reflect that.

And what better place to showcase this new sensibility than the wilds of Tribeca, a former commercial section of Manhattan below Canal Street that, while it featured street after cobblestone street of striking cast-iron buildings, became spookily barren at night, save for the inviting glow of the Odeon's neon.

Through the doors was a movie set doubling as a restaurant, an uncharacteristically wide space of buttery light, ribbed glass, and burnished wood that recalled both Paris's La Coupole and Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles, albeit with a Bakelite frieze of New York's skyline on the wall. A carefully chosen mix of old standards and New Wave played on the sound system, anything from Ella Fitzgerald and Georgie Fame to the Shangri-Las and Talking Heads.

The Odeon looked cool but exuded warmth, which is not a sentiment associated with the 80s, a decade best remembered for the three C's-not Clemente, Chia, and Cucchi, but cash, cynicism, and cocaine, as well as that holdover from the 70s, casual sex. The perspectives of writers, artists, gallery owners, waiters, and cooks who ushered in the era at the Odeon tend to be rosier. Yes, they admit, drugs and sex could be had there, particularly if one knew about the storage closet beneath the stairs, but those commodities were everywhere in New York. What made the Odeon special, they say, is that, in the formative years of the decade, it became a clubhouse where the young men and women who would determine the direction of the culture-high and low-for at least the next 10 years came to network, flirt, and occasionally fight. aids, moneygrubbing, and the ravages of prolonged drug use-not to mention age, the usual suspect-would soon sober up the crowd, but for a few euphoric years there were rules to be rewritten and reputations to be made.

And that included the reputations of the young trio who had opened the Odeon: the London-born Keith McNally, his older brother Brian, and a fresh-faced transplant from Streator, Illinois, named Lynn Wagenknecht, who would eventually marry, and later divorce, Keith.