(True to form, most of the lights inside are actually red). In the midst of all this corporate sterility, The Cock stands out like a precarious red light in a city without a red light district. Hell’s Kitchen, once considered a dangerous place to live due to its reputation for grisly gang violence, today feels like Disneyland. Midtown, the corporate chunk of the island below Central Park where Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley are headquartered, has expanded south, swallowing everything in its path. The gentrification sweeping New York has made it a city of elites there are more billionaires here than any city on earth. It’s hard to stay open in the city that never sleeps - and never gets cheaper. But neither AIDS nor a villainous mayor were as instrumental in their death as the gay bar’s oldest foe: rent prices. (The Cock was also raided frequently under Giuliani.) Many others were lost before that, under the onslaught of AIDS in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Those old gay bars were raided often by police, and under Rudy Giuliani’s mayorship from 1994 to 2001, many of them closed, swept away in an aggressive urban renewal objective that some longtime residents claim was the death of New York City’s edge.
