Radio City is recorded as a public venue where an anniversary celebration and a high-profile boxing match framed two contrasting evenings in 1982. The diary gives little description of the building itself; its presence emerges through the people, plans, and crowds drawn there.

The Fiftieth Anniversary

On March 26, 1982, the venue was marking its fiftieth anniversary. Maura Moynihan had called several times that day, and Andy Warhol thought she would make a good date. He also hoped they could continue work on his musical project, then called Music Hotel, which concerned Maura and her two boyfriends. After taking a cab to Radio City, he found the evening boring. The occasion thus appears less as a celebration than as the setting for plans that failed to deliver either an engaging date or momentum on the project.

A Boxing Crowd

On June 11, Warhol went to Radio City with Richard Weisman to watch the Cooney-Holmes fight, after first meeting him at 21 Club for a party. Tickets cost $30, and the screen made the image strikingly clear. The men had placed bets beforehand; Warhol held the money and picked Holmes to win in the fourth, a prediction that nearly seemed possible when Holmes was knocked down in the second. Instead, Holmes won by a technical knockout in the thirteenth round. The audience had been for Cooney, and it booed the result. Radio City’s role here was collective and charged: the screen brought the fight close, while the crowd made the outcome a shared, noisy disappointment for the favored side.