Fisticuffs Keeping It So Real In Hell's Kitchen
First rule of biweekly fight club at St. Paul the Apostle on Columbus Ave.? Tell every reporter you see! Gym proprietor Justin Blair's "Friday Night Fights" finally makes it to Sunday Styles today, and everybody, patrons and writers alike, is on talking-point message.
The place feels like something out of "On the Waterfront," as the crowd lustily cheers the glistening boxers fighting inside a central ring under a low-vaulted brick ceiling..."You got thugs from the ghetto, and blue-collar working class types, and you got rich dudes and hipsters," said DJ Mano, who provides the music between fights and between rounds.
"Manhattan is so tame now," said one fan, Mitzi Robles, a 26-year-old hair stylist at a SoHo salon. "It's cool to go to something down and dirty and underground. Such a diverse crowd: doctors, lawyers, brain surgeons, pimps."
Nearby stood a man dressed in a yellow suit, yellow tie, yellow fedora and yellow Algonquin-toe shoes. The man, Andre Spriggs, 37, a private investigator from Staten Island, said he had come for the partying and the pugilism. "This is Hell's Kitchen living up to its name," he said.
I think "pimps" means "hair stylists" in PRese.In Hell's Basement [NYT]