Raising a Glass in Manhattan. Actually Lots of Them. (Published 2005) (2024)

It may not come as news to bartenders, waiters and sommeliers, but New Yorkers drink a lot, a new City Health Department study shows. But what may not be so obvious to those who pour for a living is that New Yorkers in some neighborhoods drink much more than those in others.

The study -- based on information collected in 2003 as part of the city's community health survey -- suggests that the heaviest drinking neighborhoods are Greenwich Village and Chelsea, where 32 percent of adults report drinking amounts that the report defines as excessive, followed by the Upper East Side and Upper West Side and Gramercy Park in Manhattan, and Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope in Brooklyn.

The study also breaks down the city's drinkers by age and race -- white New Yorkers in the most affluent neighborhoods are twice as likely as those in poor neighborhoods to drink excessively -- but does not address some of the historic intangibles that make those in one place more likely to drink than those in others. The Upper East Side and Park Slope, for example, have drinking cultures that stretch back decades, to times when the neighborhoods bore little resemblance to those today.

And the report defines "excessive" in a way that may prompt dispute. The survey considers a man to be drinking excessively if he has more than two drinks a day -- or 60 a month -- and a woman to be drinking excessively if she has more than one drink a day (30 a month). There is no way to tell whether those being interviewed are telling the truth.

In Park Slope yesterday, Jesse Howard, a bartender at the Gate, said that the definitions used by the Health Department classify just about everybody he knows as a problem drinker. "That sounds like a lot of Bloomberg" nonsense, Mr. Howard said, only he did not use the word nonsense. "New York's that kind of town; it always has been. People go out."

Mr. Howard looked off into the distance. It was mid-afternoon, and the bluegrass harmonies of the Old Crow Medicine Show coming through the speakers sounded loud in the uncrowded room. Mr. Howard spoke up again, this time to clarify that his opinion was not colored by his professional experience.