Only the 39 restaurants directly owned by TGI, not franchised locations, are affected by the bankruptcy filing.
He lived on 63rd Street between First and York Avenues, [ 11 ] in a neighborhood with many airline stewardesses , fashion models , secretaries, and other young, single people on the East Side of Manhattan near the Queensboro Bridge. He hoped that opening a bar would help him meet women. Stillman's choices for socializing were non-public cocktail parties or guys' beer-drinking hangout bars that women usually would not visit; he recalled that "there was no public place for people between, say, twenty-three to thirty-seven years old, to meet.
The exterior featured a red-and-white striped awning and blue paint; the Gay Nineties interior included Tiffany-style lamps , wooden floors, Bentwood chairs, and striped tablecloths; and the bar area added brass rails and stained glass. The employees were young men: handsome jocks in form-fitting red-and-white striped soccer shirts ; [ 13 ] [ 15 ] when a patron was celebrating a birthday, the entire restaurant crew came around with a cake and sang TGI Fridays' traditional birthday song.
Although Malachy McCourt 's nearby Malachy's singles bar preceded TGI Fridays [ 17 ] and Stillman credited the media for creating the term, he had unintentionally created one of the first singles bars.
It benefited from the near-simultaneous availability of the birth-control pill and Betty Friedan 's book The Feminine Mystique : [ 13 ] [ 12 ] [ 11 ]. I don't think there was anything else like it at the time. Before TGI Fridays, four single twenty-five-year-old girls were not going out on Friday nights, in public and with each other, to have a good time.
