Mad Men's Manhattan. Mark P. Bernardo

      Introduction

      Bert Cooper: “New York City is a marvelous machine, filled with a mesh of gears and springs, like a fine watch … wound tight, always ticking.” Don Draper: “Sounds more like a bomb.”

       — Conversation at the Sterling Cooper office, Season 1, “New Amsterdam”

      Mad Men premiered on the AMC (American Movie Classics) channel on July 19, 2007. It was the first original drama series to air on the cable station, and expectations were high thanks to the pedigree of its creator, Matthew Weiner, writer and producer on HBO’s The Sopranos, one of the most successful and critically acclaimed cable dramas.

      Most critics were not disappointed. Over three seasons, the series won nine Emmy Awards, including two for Outstanding Drama Series, the first basic cable show to do so; and five Golden Globes, including one for series star Jon Hamm as Best Actor in a Drama Series in 2008. The series was honored by the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild of America, the Art Directors Guild, and the International Press Academy. Once regarded as a cult hit, its audience has steadily grown. The Season 1 premiere drew 900,000 viewers; the Season 3 premiere in 2009 attracted 2.8 million. Mad Men has become a bona fide cultural phenomenon, helping to fuel revivals of 1960s-inspired fashions and cocktails of the era.

      The series centers on the dashing, enigmatic Don Draper (Hamm), creative director at Sterling Cooper, a high-powered Madison Avenue advertising agency. He lives with his wife Betty (January Jones) and children in the Westchester County town of Ossining, but his job—and his numerous extramarital affairs— often keep him distant from his suburban home life. At work, Don cultivates a friendship with senior partner Roger Sterling (John Slattery), son of one of the firm’s founders, a rakish, old-school male chauvinist with even more of a roving eye for the fairer sex than Don, and finds himself in a rivalry, then a grudging mentor relationship, with Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), a young Ivy League-educated accounts manager whose attempts to climb the corporate ladder are often ruthless. The character of Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss), introduced in the pilot as Don’s new secretary, embodies the changing times: she has an affair with the married Pete, births a child out of wedlock in secret to avoid the taboo of the times, and breaks out of the secretarial pool to become Sterling Cooper’s first female copywriter. Peggy’s rise is sometimes met with resentment by the rest of Don’s team: progressive, pipe-smoking copywriter Paul Kinsey (Michael Gladis); charismatic, golden-boy accounts man Ken Cosgrove (Aaron Staton); and the earnest, bow-tied head of media, Harry Crane (Rich Sommer). Rounding out the office cast are Salvatore Romano (Bryan Batt), the Italian-American art director keeping his own taboo secret, as a closeted gay man in the WASPy old boys’ club of 1960s advertising, and office queen bee and lust object Joan Holloway Harris (Christina Hendricks), who lords over the secretarial pool and carries on a secret affair with Roger.

      New York City is also a character in the series—the fascinating, romanticized, energetic, and rapidly evolving New York of the 1960s. A New York where you could light up a cigarette at the bar or after dinner at a restaurant. A city where a table at Lutèce, Sardi’s, or the Four Seasons or a sighting at the Stork Club or El Morocco was the height of social status. A city where the advertising business was booming in the wake of postwar prosperity, where the forward thinkers at firms like McCann-Erickson, Grey, and upstart innovators like Doyle Dane Bernbach were rewriting the rules of how the business worked and living large at the same time. A city where men wore hats with their Brooks Brothers suits and removed them when a lady walked into the elevator, where suburban housewives met and gossiped at the hair salon and shopped for the new fashions at Bloomingdale’s and Henri Bendel.

      Yet it was also a city teetering on the brink of massive social change. Beat poets and folk singers filled the smoky coffee houses of Greenwich Village and Gilded Age architectural icons like the original Penn Station gave way to austere, modernist slabs like Madison Square Garden. The generations that fought in World War II and Korea were yielding in the workplace to the one that would protest Vietnam; slugging back a stiff whiskey in the creative department would soon be supplanted by smoking of surreptitious joint.

      The first season ends with the election of John F. Kennedy; the second, with the Cuban Missile Crisis; the third, with Kennedy’s assassination. Historical events touch the characters in various ways, from the death of Marilyn Monroe to the civil rights march in Birmingham to the crash of American Airlines Flight 1 in 1962.

      This book introduces readers—whether they are native New Yorkers or Mad Men fans who have never set foot in the city—to the places, both famous and not so famous, that play a role in the historical and dramatic tapestry of the first three seasons of Mad Men, from the famous Madison Avenue ad agencies that inspired its setting to the taverns, restaurants, and hotels that host so many of the series’ memorable scenes.

      New York remains a dynamic, ever-changing city, and forty-five years is a long time, so, sadly, some of the places highlighted here have closed. In my research, however, I have been pleased to find that in many cases, their legacy lives on, whether it is in a new establishment with the name and spirit of the original (as with El Morocco) or a modern-day venue keeping the artifacts of the original alive (as with the Stork Club’s wooden bar at Jim Brady’s). I have also made an effort to include places that did not merit a specific mention in the series but were contemporaries of places now long gone (e.g., the Kettle of Fish and Café Wha? in Greenwich Village, which are the closest a visitor will get to experiencing the gone but fondly remembered Gaslight Café). The majority of the sites, however, are still around—a few, like P. J. Clarke’s and the Four Seasons, virtually unchanged from the 1960s—places where you can eat, drink, shop, see a show, stay a night, or (in the case of the advertising agencies) maybe even have a job interview.

      All the sites are in the borough of Manhattan, which necessarily leaves out the suburban sites referenced in Mad Men, particularly in