In Hell's Basement
By COREY KILGANNON
Published: May 20, 2007 (NY Times)

Rounds of beer and fighting make Fridays interesting. St. Paul the Apostle Church basement, Columbus Avenue and 60th Street

THE bimonthly parties held in the squat basement of St. Paul the Apostle, a church on Columbus Avenue, are not your typical Manhattan affair.

GETTING IN
Boxing starts at 8 p.m. Tickets are $25 online (fridaynightfights.com) and $30 at the door, but are usually sold out beforehand.

DRESS CODE
Gym apparel if you look like a boxer. Street clothes if you don't.

SIGHTINGS
Jimmy Fallon, David Cross.

SIGNATURE DRINK
Singha beer, $4 a can.

Going there means dodging groups of carousing iron workers and men carrying spit buckets. The air is laden with liniment, sweat and the grunt of fighters. Vendors sell cans of beer at $4 apiece from trays slung over their shoulders in the style of old-fashioned cigarette girls.

The place feels like something out of 'On the Waterfront,' as the crowd lustily cheers the glistening boxers fighting inside a central ring under a low-vaulted brick ceiling. This is the gritty charm of Friday Night Fights, held roughly every two months at the church, on Columbus Avenue and 60th Street. (The next one is June 8.)

'You got thugs from the ghetto, and blue-collar working class types, and you got rich dudes and hipsters,' said DJ Mano, who provides the music between fights and between rounds.

Justin Blair, who owns the Church Street Boxing Gym in Lower Manhattan, began holding the fight nights in the basement of his gym in 1997, but he now rents larger spaces like the church. He said the amateur boxing cards, which also feature kickboxing, are his attempt to run an 'old-school fight club.'

One recent Friday night, a crowd of about 1,200 squeezed into the space. They included representatives from the city's various tribes: burly guys in tight union T-shirts, well-scrubbed office types in loosened neckties glancing at BlackBerrys and groups of young men in baggy hoodies and prominent jewelry. Most women were escorted by the kind of beefy men you'd dread meeting in the ring.

'Manhattan is so tame now,' said one fan, Mitzi Robles, a 26-year-old hair stylist at a SoHo salon. 'It's cool to go to something down and dirty and underground. Such a diverse crowd: doctors, lawyers, brain surgeons, pimps.'

Nearby stood a man dressed in a yellow suit, yellow tie, yellow fedora and yellow Algonquin-toe shoes. The man, Andre Spriggs, 37, a private investigator from Staten Island, said he had come for the partying and the pugilism. 'This is Hell's Kitchen living up to its name,' he said.