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Nate Freeman

Nate Freeman contributes to The New York Observer living in Manhattan. Mr. Freeman writes The Wee Hours, a nightlife column that appears each week in the paper. nfreeman@observer.com @NFreeman1234

By Nate Freeman 1/24 6:53pm

Nightlife

Illo: David Saracino

The Wee Hours: A Reporter Goes from Soft Openings to Hard Time

The Observer was arrested last Friday for entering the subway through an emergency exit. We were cuffed, frisked and led by a police officer through the station. Commuters with tote bags stared.

We found ourselves in a holding cell in the Union Square station precinct with a man named Felix, who had been brought in for sharing a MetroCard with his pregnant wife. Two others came, and then left with desk appearance tickets.

But we would be joining Felix in central booking. We had a warrant, an open container summons, a relic from a summer in 2008. Ah, right: the G Train, with that girl, drinking Sparks out of a brown paper bag.

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By Nate Freeman 1/10 7:41pm

The Wee Hours

A deep pour of self awareness. (Peter Arkle)

The Wee Hours Takes a Vacation—To Bahamian Dissipation

The grand plan was to stay sober for the month of January, and it failed. It collapsed the moment we touched down in the Bahamas and felt the silky warmth outside the Nassau airport. The whole place was wet with the prospect of booze—its bars, its dewy palm trees, its bikini-wearing swimmers, its cerulean wading pools. The plane’s tires hit the tarmac, and from then on, rum was god.

In the boxy cab we removed our loafers, took off our socks, stuffed them in a spare pocket of a hand-me-down attaché case and shoved our heels back into the miniature leather gondolas. The engine growled down hardy roads, handling the this-way-that-way roundabouts with the finesse of an arcade pinball.

It was 13 degrees in New York and we had taken up our father’s offer of a trip to Paradise Island. Read More

By Nate Freeman 1/04 1:22pm

Wee Hours

The party is just getting started.

Loft Parties, Cab Rides, Late-Night Fights and Rueful Reassessments: It Must Be New Year’s Eve

A fight broke out seven hours into the new year.

“You’re my fucking brother,” shouted a man on Houston Street. “I’ve known you for, oh, how many fucking years, and you know, on our mother, I would never hit somebody.”

The stomping and tears echoed four floors below our apartment. From out our window, where we were smoking, the two men ended a long night—stretched into daylight—with an argument kicked up along the shuttered storefronts of the Lower East Side. Read More

By Nate Freeman 12/15/11 11:18am

Smoking

Illo: Chris Gash

Island Smokes Brings New Yorkers the $3 Pack of Smokes…but for How Long?

Around the middle of the summer, brightly colored fliers started appearing on the Lower East Side, strewn across coffee shop counters and discarded on curbs. “Island Smokes,” they said. “A healthier, less expensive alternative to smoking. Amazing!!!” There was a cartoon palm tree swaying on some exotic atoll to drive the point home, but more intriguing was the word “discount.” And then the details: this wasn’t really so much an alternative to smoking as a way to do it cheaper. Island Smokes went for $29.99 a carton. Three bucks a pack. Peanuts.

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By Nate Freeman 4:16pm

Nightlife

ALima4_042706

The Wee Hours: Pirelli’s Nude Calendar Girls at the Armory

Supermodel Isabeli Fontata walked to the edge of the Corsican cliff in a bikini bottom that matched her own skin tone, and once she took off that thin bit of cloth, she had nothing on. Her back arched and a hand went up to flutter wind-flung hair. She held her breasts and let them go, bearing them to the canyon below as the photographer Mario Sorrenti moved in, slowly, to snap the picture.

And then the video froze, leaving her nude, immobile figure projected upon an enormous screen. The audience went silent. We forgot we were watching a movie.

For The Observer, who is not a morning person, it was a lot to take in at 10 a.m.

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By Nate Freeman 11/15/11 6:46pm

Nightlife

Illo: Peter Arkle

The Wee Hours: Close Encounters, Heavenly Bodies at Victoria’s Secret Show

The first thing we noticed about the den of Angels was the smell.

Hours before the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, the creaky freight elevator in the Lexington Avenue Armory rattled up to the fifth floor. As the doors opened, a sharp tang of beauty-product acid smacked up against us, a collision of perfumes cut with a sweet whiff of lotions, the clouds of hairspray gushing from big bottles and wafting throughout the space. Past two aisles of models in pink gowns, beyond the couch where the most beautiful women in the world sat tonging mounds of salad with silver implements, was Karlie Kloss, a St. Louis native who, at 19 years of age, may be the most important model in the world. Read More

By Nate Freeman 11/02/11 9:59am

Nightlife

Illo: Peter Oumanski

The Wee Hours: Midtown’s Halloween Hall of Mirrors

“I don’t recognize you,” said a man in a black negligee, black corset, black heels and two stuck-on circles of black mesh, one covering his mouth and another covering his crotch. It was early Sunday evening, Halloween eve, and he was talking to a man in a dress, with pink hair.

Somehow, he managed to nestle a cigarette into the small indentation in the spandex oral wrapping. Read More

By Nate Freeman 10/25/11 7:09pm

Nightlife

NYObathtub

The Wee Hours: Nightlife’s New Holiest of Holies

On one of the last busy evenings of Fashion Week, the suppertime clique that had turned up for the AnOther magazine dinner at the Fat Radish on Orchard was making the trek to the after-party. A breeze had split the night’s air. Most of the gang opted to walk, despite—or due to?—the hash brownies with which many, including The Observer, had topped off the meal.

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1 By Nate Freeman 10/18/11 6:46pm

The Wee Hours

Gutfreund

The Wee Hours: Occupy Easy Street!

Almost a month after a group of well-educated New Yorkers first unrolled their sleeping bags in Zuccotti Park, The Observer took a taxicab to 64th Street and Fifth Avenue to attend a gathering at the home of John Gutfreund. It was a cocktail party to celebrate The Artist, an Oscar hopeful that had just had its premiere at the New York Film Festival. Mr. Gutfreund's wife, Susan, had been generous enough to invite the cast, crew, and producers to her and her husband's home for a thing after.

Most of those involved in the film spoke French, and Ms. Gutfreund is fluent.

"This was all my wife's idea," Mr. Gutfreund told The Observer.

The 1980s boom-time chief of Salomon Brothers was slim beneath his suit, but not frail, and his thin oval spectacles only enhanced his stature. We spoke about his friend Katherine’s son, who used to write about nightlife for this newspaper. George, we told Mr. Gutfreund, is doing well. Then arms took other arms and we lost each other, for the moment, somewhere between Hamish Bowles and Harvey Weinstien.

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By Nate Freeman 10/11/11 7:29pm

The Wee Hours

Ms. Mulligan, Ms. Williams, Ms. Dunst.

The Wee Hours: Sex and Death at Alice Tully Hall

“Wow, this is it, this view, New York City!” Michael Fassbender said after opening the door to the roof of the Standard, where the glass buildings lining the West Side bound forth from the meatpacking district toward midtown. It was Friday night, and The Observer had just watched the New York Film Festival’s screening of Read More