Terminal Bar: A Photographic Record of New York's Most Notorious Watering Hole

Stefan Nadelman

Oct 2014 · Chronicle Books

About this ebook

In 1972 Shelly Nadelman began a ten-year run bartending at one of New York City's most notorious dives: the Terminal Bar, located across the street from the Port Authority Bus Terminal near Times Square. For ten years, right up until the bar closed for good in 1982, he shot thousands of black-and-white photographs, mostly portraits of his customers— neighborhood regulars, drag queens, thrill-seeking tourists, pimps and prostitutes, midtown office workers dropping by before catching a bus home to the suburbs—all of whom found welcome and respite at the Terminal Bar. This extraordinary archive remained unseen for twenty years until his son Stefan rescued the collection, using parts of it in a documentary short. Featuring nine hundred photographs accompanied by reminiscences in Shelly Nadelman's inimitable voice, Terminal Bar brings back to life the 1970s presanitized Times Square, a raucous chapter of the city that never sleeps.

About the author

Stefan Nadelman is Shelly Nadelman's son. He directs films and commercials, and works as a freelance designer and animator. His film Terminal Bar won the Jury Prize for Short Filmmaking at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. It went on to screen at more than sixty other film festivals worldwide, gathering eleven more awards and earning a spot on Cinema16's American Short Films DVD.

Sheldon (Shelly) Nadelman bought his first and only Pentax camera in 1969 and enrolled in the Institute of Photography, where he learned the basics of shooting and printing. During the decade from 1972 to 1982, he worked as a bartender at the Terminal Bar, across the street from New York's Port Authority bus terminal, taking thousands of photographs of the notorious dive's interior and clientele. He still takes photographs with the same 35mm camera, and has lived in East Brunswick, New Jersey, with his family since 1975.