Fern bar

Friday's on the corner of 63rd Street and First Avenue in a neighborhood on the Upper East Side of New York City, where many young single adults lived at the time.

The founder, Alan Stillman, borrowed several thousand dollars from his mother, leased a saloon and remodeled it, converting the ambience to one that he thought might be attractive to young single women.

[3][4] The bar opened in 1969 at Broadway and Polk Streets by out-of-work veteran Norman Hobday, who by his own account "took the opium-den atmosphere out of the saloons" in favor of "antique lamps and Grandma's living-room furniture."

By some accounts Hobday copied the concept from another restaurant, Perry's,[5] which opened several months earlier and was made famous as a singles "meet market" by Armistead Maupin's novel, Tales of the City.

Typical drinks served included wine spritzers, lemon drop martinis, frozen daiquirís, Harvey Wallbangers, and piña coladas.