A singles bar slaying on the Upper West Side

On January 3, 1973, a young woman was found stabbed 14 times in a cluttered studio apartment at 253 West 72nd Street.

Her name was Roseann Quinn, a 28-year-old special-ed teacher.

It was a tabloid-ready slaying for the singles bar era: Quinn was reported to be a regular at the singles bars along a slightly seedy West 72nd Street.

Patrons at one bar supposedly said she often sat alone there and read—and sometimes picked up men.

After few weeks, cops arrested John Wayne Wilson. He was accused of going back to Quinn’s place with her after meeting at a bar called W.M. Tweeds, then killing her a few hours later. 

Wilson was never tried; he committed suicide in jail six months later.

Quinn’s murder became the inspiration for the book and movie Looking for Mr. Goodbar as well as an emblem of the 1970s singles scene in a much more rough-around-the-edges New York.

“Swinging, exclusively single social events”

In 1970, the whole idea of a singles scene was still pretty new. The first bar officially known as a singles bar—a T.G.I. Friday’s on East 63rd Street and First Avenue—opened in 1965, packing in young unmarried professionals and turning First and Second Avenues uptown into a singles zone in the late 1960s and 1970s.

Soon ads like these, from the March 28, 1970 issue of Cue magazine, began springing up, hoping to attract New Yorkers looking for a mate. And the era of the desperate, Looking for Mr. Goodbar single was born.

Considering that they make a point of accepting anyone 18 to 50, this social events group doesn’t look especially promising. I wonder just how “elegant” the “swinging night clubs” Plaza 9, Act 1, and The Roundtable really were!