It’s been about a year since I’ve hit the 27th Street scene, but apparently things have gotten really bad over there.

So, who can you blame? Well, besides Joe Jon B, owner of money-pumpers Home and Guest House (and proponent of a very liberal door policy), you can also focus your hate on one of your own. It was Joe Jon B who capitalized on the celebrities > models > bankers + bottles profit formula, according to this NYMag piece, but it was legions of promoters and people like the banker below who filled the cavernous clubs night after night:

“The owners of the events company Impulse would bring a hundred of their friends from Long Island on any given night. David Jaffee, an investment banker, would send out e-mail blasts beginning, ‘Greetings from my cubicle on Wall Street’ to 75,000 people whom he encouraged to attend parties where he rarely deigned to appear.”

Sounds very much like someone I know.

In any case, there’s something too funny that a) bankers are constantly referred to as “businessmen” throughout the article, and b) have pretty much been taken to town by these shysters with this whole bottle service pyramid scheme. So much so that this scene (can anyone say “models and bottles“) is how bankers choose to define themselves.

Incidentally, the NYMag piece describes the origin of bottle service below. I disagree. Gold star to anyone who can correctly pin the origin of bottle service!

“Noah Tepperberg, a balding, gravel-voiced Stuyvesant graduate, and Jason Strauss, his boyhood friend from Riverdale … dreamed of creating an exclusive club like Sacco’s but on a vast and far more profitable scale. They would manage that feat by systematizing what might be called the club cascade effect: Celebrities attract models, models attract businessmen, and businessmen bring dollars.

The financial basis for this dream already was in place in the form of a high-profit sales technique developed by David Sarner, an owner of Soho’s ever-crowded Spy Bar. In 1995, Sarner realized he had more customers than his bartenders could handle. So Sarner brought the bar straight to the tables. He delivered vodka, mixers, ice, and glassware and allowed customers to pour their own cocktails. The next year, at Chaos, Sarner and his partner Michael Ault made bottle service mandatory—if you wanted to sit at your own table. Buying a bottle became a badge of status, and nightclub owners found a brand-new profit center.

Tepperberg and Strauss implemented bottle service on an industrial scale. In an abandoned taxi garage on the southwest corner of 27th Street and Tenth Avenue, just a few hundred feet from Bungalow 8, they created Marquee.”

Fascinating.