Context:

The subject is a white male and a lifelong New Yorker from Manhattan and Queens. He is my twin brother and we attended the boarding school Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. Before this we were discussing what New York had begun to mean to us when we moved out to school, how we always heard stories and how it became a party location that we returned to when school was let out. I love this idea of New York teen folk culture because we could not have a overculture because what we were doing was illegal. The knowledge itself was folklore because it was passed on through person to person and it changed based on who knew what and sometime they were wrong. And then there were stories about the places we went because there was so little formal knowledge about them.

Piece:

“Theres like certain places, that people like, like everyone knows the places that don’t card. You know what I mean? Its sorta the same thi-way a bunch of people know this thing. You learn from other people, from.. I think – I had friends who were older than me and its sorta passed down like that. So there’s this place called 212 Hisae, or just 212, on 2nd Avenue and 9th Street I wanna say but I could be inaccurate, you can google map it, uh. They don’t card, I’ve been there!…sometimes. There was this place called Dahlia’s, but I think they got shut down because they ended up serving middle schoolers ‘cause that’s how much they didn’t card. I assume what happened was that college kids were doing it, high schoolers found out and started doing it, and then middle schoolers found out and started drinking at Dahlia’s. I heard this, maybe senior yet of high school. I don’t remember who told me, I’m sorry, I think it’s just like a thing people were like saying, you know what I mean?