"…After awhile, he told Chan we were going out to have a few drinks. It was a Ukrainian neighborhood and we went to three or four different bars. All the Ukrainians, working-class guys, knew him as Charlie. I don't think they knew he was a musician…" Al Cohn on Charlie Parker, Celebrating Bird. p.110.

The first ever New York municipal election I voted in was the mayoral election of 1989, also known as Dinkins v. Guiliani I. As we watched the debates back in the Brittany, we heard both Guiliani and Dinkins talk about keeping the 'best and the brightest of the best and the brightest' coming to New York. This was something that we all cheered at NYU, as we were supposed to be this group they were talking about. Our biggest concern, at the time, was where we were going to live. The neighborhoods we came to live in - the Lower East Side, East and West Village, Gramercy, and Chelsea - were becoming more and more expensive to live in. These areas were the same ones most of our relatives came to in eras of immigration past.

And Jesus, did our parents freak.

Here we were moving back to the same neighborhoods they left in the '50s, 60s and '70s. They moved up on the social scale and away from their childhood or the Hippie ghetto. Then their children hung them the finger and moved right back.

But, from our stand point, what we were moving back to was the classic Artist's ghetto. These were the same streets that our heroes had walked on just a few years before. Dylan and Reed hung in the Village and Lower East Side. The Beats were all over the East Village and West Village. Leonard Cohen and Dylan Thomas were in Chelsea. Gramercy held those artists who made it, not to mention Max's Kansas City. This is what we came to. You didn't see the young dispossessed wannabes go to the Upper East Side. Not only were the rents too high but that's where the parents were.

The dichotomy that was lost on us was what these districts of Manhattan truly were - real working-class neighborhoods. These districts didn't have suburban Country Clubs or the Social clubs of ethnic enclaves past. No. They had bars, baby. Bars where you could cash your check on Thursday night, pay the week's bar tab, and then take the rest home to the wife to for grocery money and rent. We only knew the rent was affordable.

These places also served as private clubs for neighborhood old timers that had nowhere else to go. No air conditioning in the apartment? No problem, we have it. The wife and kids are driving you nuts? No problem, we have the boys and ice cold beer.

The Gin Mills have seen a lot in the American Century, some of the good, some of the bad and a lot of the dark side of our spirit - the violence, the death and destruction that is inherent to our history. Perhaps the most important thing they saw and in fact nurtured was the hip culture that we all worshipped at NYU. This culture that included Be-Bop, the Folk revival, Punk Rock, the Multimedia Artists, Underground film, Dirty Comics and so much more. The practitioners of these art forms met, and broke up and worked and drank in these joints. Whether it was Selby Jr., Mort Sahl and John Prine in the neighborhoods they came from or Dylan, Reed and Kerouac coming to the Village, they had a Gin Mill to go to.

And now, they're gone, at least most of them. The old bars that used to dot 11th Avenue and the Waterfront that catered to the Longshoremen, Dylan Thomas, and later the gay S&M community; the Angle Bar in Times Square; McCoy's on 9th Avenue; The Lion's Head; and God knows how many places in Brooklyn. They have been replaced by Super Pubs, lounges and Sports Bars that cater to the next generation that has inhabited the old Artist's Ghetto's. These kids are enamored of the Nirvanas, Graffiti Artists, Cyber Punk authors, hip-hop stars and the celebrity culture that has taken rise in the age of the Internet and 24/7 cable TV.

There are those of my friends that want to place the blame on the denigration of the American culture, the slow sink into vulgarity and gross affluence. The general lack of soul, perhaps, of the next generation. All of these have elements of truth, but that's not why these places are closing.

Yes, many have become victims of increased rents, but that's just a sign of the country becoming wealthier. And believe me, the old residents of these neighborhoods who owned the buildings or apartments they lived in are getting richer as they sell their stakes in the American Dream to the next speculator. After all, isn't that why these people scrimped and saved all these years so their kids could have a better life? And that is true, too, but that isn't why these Gin Mills are going.

The real reason is far simpler and much sadder: times and people change.

In the United States of America, when times change, we reinvent and rebuild. I know the statement is cold, as cold as the old refrain that one too many of my girlfriends have used to break up with me - "It's not you, it's me". It is the simultaneous part of our make-up that is the source of our greatest strength and our most troubling failings.

Admittedly, these loses don't rise to the level of the old Penn Station or the old Brooklyn Dodgers field. But with each Gin Mill lost, another piece of history is consigned to those times we bounce our kids or grandkids on our knees. You know, the 'Good Ole Days' of yore.

I and many others will miss these joints. I'll miss the camaraderie, hanging out with my peers, the other young writers and artists trying to make it. I walked by one the other day up on Lexington Ave. between 84th and 85th, Carlow East. Now an Irish bar for the Upper East Side set, it was a great Gin joint back in 1996 when I was dating a girl that lived at 84th and 3rd. After one of our many argument and make up cycles, I walked in to this place - the closest to her apartment - to get a beer. It was covered in bad wood paneling, old browning pictures and bad black and white vinyl floor tile. It looked so out of place in the wealthy neighborhood that Yorkville had become. I ordered a Guiness. The old barman looked over the glasses on the tip of his nose.

"You live in the neighborhood?" he asked.

"No, I date a girl who lives on the corner." I proceeded to tell him all about my relationship with this girl - the fights, the breakups, the make ups.

He put a shot glass in front of me and poured me a double of Jim Beam. "Son," he said, "when you're in a spicy relationship with the girls in this neighborhood, you need to drink bourbon. It will help you forget."

And there was a thought to rival those in my best philosophy classes.