Scene @ Secret New York Launch Party

Amanda ReCupido joined about 100 other guests crammed into the back room at Onieal’s last night at the launch party for Michelle Haimoff‘s Secret New York, a guide to some of the city’s less familiar but more interesting landmark locations. After chatting with Haimoff (right), she sent this report:

“‘I’ve lived in New York my whole life and never knew that half of these places existed,’ Haimoff said of the locations listed in her book. ‘There is so much history surrounding the area that people just don’t know about.’ Haimoff admitted, however, that she was not a natural historian: ‘There was a lot of internet research and cross-referencing,’ she said of her fact-checking methods.

“It turned out that the party venue was not only a chic restaurant, but a historic site as well. ‘Back by the kitchen, there’s a tunnel that leads across the street to the site of an old speakeasy joint,’ Haimoff explained. ‘The cops would use it during Prohibition to enter unseen.’ We were lucky they weren’t using it to monitor our progress at the open bar, although it might have convinced Haimoff to take us on our own historic walking tour. ‘I’ll be out with my friends and pass random buildings and say, “Oh, that used to be a brothel that Mark Twain used to frequent,”‘ she joked. Sounds like the first glimpses of a new ‘Sex and the City’ walking tour, except about great writers and whiskey in place of bitchy women and cosmos—which is more our cup of tea anyways.”

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