Monday Surveying Koreatown
- Location: West 32nd Street, Manhattan
- Best song to sing: “Poker Face,” by Lady Gaga
We began the week where many end it, on the dense corridor of West 32nd Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Along this stretch of Koreatown, karaoke bars, podiatrists, escape rooms, and coworking spaces stack atop one another. Our crawl started at Gagopa, whose BYOB policy is a favorite among the large-group partiers and Midtown corporate crowd for fast-tracking camaraderie. The bar eluded us at first, not for a lack of signage but for its location on the fourth story of its building, and the search more or less provided a template for our crawl: a ride up an elevator the size of an airplane lavatory and head-scratching decor. At Gagopa’s sister bar, 32 Karaoke, this last item consists of Polaroids of visiting groups on the walls—the very karaoke canon that, once you’ve stepped through its doors, you become part of.
Anticipatory staircases aside, no amount of symbolic literacy can prepare you for a K-town elevator panel. Despite its abundance of labeled buttons, deciphering them only makes things more confusing. To reach Space Karaoke Bar and Lounge, for instance, you have to avoid accidentally ending up at Space Ping Pong, one of two Space sports bars, or the Space golf simulator. Take it as a sign to stop trying to make sense of things and just embrace the ride.
Across the street, Chorus Karaoke Lounge has a clubbier feel, with a purple-and-blue-lit bar. To the left is a hallway of private rooms, lined with porthole window portraits of Madonna, Morrissey, Elvis, and all the other greats. On the evening we visited, only one karaoke room at the end of the white hallway was occupied—by a lone singer crooning to himself. It may well have been a strict weekly ritual, the first step in a vocal warm-up regimen. “I sing, therefore I am,” read a sign near its entrance as we left, a reminder that although thinking may be proof of existence, song is proof of life. —Skyli Alvarez & Kat Chen
