N.Y. / REGION

A Manhattan McDonald’s With Many Off-the-Menu Sales

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The McDonald’s on Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, between 34th and 35th Streets, is a throwback to a seedier era in New York City. Hilary Swift/The New York Times 
Some customers pour beer into clear McCafé plastic cups and drink it right in the open. A man called Shamrock swills straight vodka from a Dasani water bottle at a table near the entrance.
The other day, a man headed straight for the bathroom, pausing only to open his backpack and grab a bag of heroin, known as “dog food.” Another day, a couple shared a McDonald’s vanilla shake at a side table and swallowed “sticks,” the anti-anxiety prescription drug Xanax, and “pins,” the anti-anxiety pill Klonopin. On a recent Wednesday, an ambulance showed up to carry away a regular who had been stabbed in an adjacent doorway, leaving blood all over the sidewalk.
The Times Square of today often seems like a theme park, a blend of wax museums, flashy billboards and slow-walking, street-clogging tourists. But this nearby McDonald’s, on Eighth Avenue between 34th and 35th Streets, is a throwback to a seedier era in New York, a place where those same tourists sit amid drug addicts looking for a fix or nodding out at tables after taking methadone, or maybe something else.
Nichole, 29, a former heroin user, lives in a shelter and goes to the McDonald’s regularly with her boyfriend. Hilary Swift/The New York Times 
“The tourists don’t know anything,” said Nichole, 29, a former heroin user who lives in a shelter and goes to the McDonald’s regularly with her boyfriend. “I love when they walk in here and look around and everybody is nodding out on a table. Because they have no idea what’s going on. They’re like, ‘Why is everybody sleeping in here?’ ”
Why there? Because within a three-minute walk there are a clinic that dispenses methadone, the substitute opioid used to treat heroin addiction; two outpatient substance-abuse programs; and a needle exchange. The neighborhood has few cheap options for hanging out. The White Castle allows only paying customers to use the restroom. The management at a Subway and two Dunkin’ Donuts claim their bathrooms are out of order.
What is left is pretty much McDonald’s — the restaurant of the masses, the great democratizer, the substitute for the community square, where it is possible to read or nurse a cheap cup of coffee for hours, or to nap after taking a daily methadone dose. In New York City, every McDonald’s has its own flavor. At one in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the same group of older Latina women, one with her hair dyed maroon, meet every afternoon, while at another in Queens, older Koreans gather most days for coffee.
Some regulars joke that the Eighth Avenue one is “zombie McDonald’s”; others call it “junkie McDonald’s.” Customer assessments on Yelp describe “a drug addict’s paradise” and advise others to “stay clear of the meth heads.” (To be fair, the addicts there are not really meth heads — people who use methamphetamines, a stimulant. Most prefer downers.)
Nobody from this McDonald’s, or the corporate office, responded to requests for comment.
Many of the patrons run a circuit, from the methadone clinic to the front of the needle exchange and then down to the restaurant for a few hours to come down after the methadone, hang out with friends and maybe hustle some business. Those who still get high run a different circuit: Sometimes they will buy drugs in the bathroom and use them right away in a stall. Sometimes they will buy in the McDonald’s but then walk around the corner to shoot up at the Wendy’s, where three individual bathrooms upstairs each lock, offering more privacy than the McDonald’s restrooms.
The patrons looking to get high sometimes buy drugs in the fast food restaurant’s bathrooms and use them right away in a stall. Hilary Swift/The New York Times 
But then they come back.
The well-lit restaurant, redone about three years ago, is decorated in a style most aptly described as a blend of Jackson Pollock, Pee-wee’s Playhouse and Denmark. Some of the walls are lime green with black swirls. Others are black with white diagonal stripes. There are inexplicable wooden-slat partitions. The two prime tables are up front, large and round with cushioned swan chairs. The regulars hang out there, or sprawl on tables in the back or pop outside for a cigarette.
“These guys, they have their thing here,” said Ray Flonard, 53, watching from a table in the back. “They take over the front. They take over the sidewalk. You can’t move down the sidewalk with all of them. But it doesn’t hurt anyone, I guess. They get all dressed up and fly and just hang out with each other all day.”
They have won this McDonald’s. They have won with sheer numbers, and because they always return. They have won despite the “no loitering sign” that sets a time limit of “30 minutes while consuming food.” They have won despite the police, who went there 200 times last year, mainly responding to disorderly conduct calls but also to arrest people selling drugs. They have won despite the security guard, one man against dozens, who has been on the job more than 20 years and sometimes shoos away the customers who pass out on the tables. He was stabbed in the leg by a regular about four years ago.
“Every day, I go through hell,” he recently said, leaning against a wall in the back. He did not want to give his name.
Everyone knows he leaves at 2 p.m. anyway.
Joey, a regular customer who drinks beer at the McDonald's, said: “I did detox, I did rehab, I did everything. Nothing worked. I have one drink and I can’t stop." Hilary Swift/The New York Times 
That is when people like Heaven take over. Heaven, one of the rowdier types, who spills from table to table, is always looking for a fight or her husband.
Another regular, Joey, also usually comes back inside after the guard leaves. On a recent Monday, at 2:30 p.m., he sat at a front table, drinking a King Cobra malt liquor and wearing a red T-shirt proclaiming “Drunknmunky.” He stepped outside for a cigarette and then started to cry.
“I did detox. I did rehab. I did everything,” said Joey, who said he sleeps on the nearby post office’s steps. “Nothing worked. I have one drink and I can’t stop, I can’t stop, I can’t stop.”
It was his 39th birthday. Within 20 minutes, he went back inside and popped open another beer.
After the security guard leaves, it is much easier to do business. Almost anything is for sale. Loose cigarettes are sold for 50 cents each. An iPod is $40. A six-pack of white socks goes for $3. Fancy headphones, still in their packaging from a nearby Duane Reade, run $8. On a recent afternoon, a man in a neon-green traffic-safety vest and an otherwise bare torso peddled a new Norelco razor, still in the box, from table to table. He would take what he could get.
“I want $5 apiece,” said a man selling canisters of Axe men’s body spray from a plastic bag. He had little luck; $5 is not a great price for Axe men’s body spray.
Alcohol and prescription drugs are openly consumed in the restaurant.Hilary Swift/The New York Times 
“Want lotion?” a woman asked loudly, perched at a front table with three bottles of Aveeno in front of her.
One regular said a bag of heroin runs $10 in the bathroom. A stick costs $5. A pin is $2 or $2.50. But all those prices vary, depending on the customer. A man from Wall Street regularly paid $25 a bag.
Other types of regulars, the so-called normals, frequent this McDonald’s, like the TV newsman in a suit who goes there only because it is near the office. And the nun of 70 years who sometimes sits in the back, where she likes to watch the scene unfold like a Broadway show.
“I get an ice cream cone for a dollar,” said the nun, Elaine Goodell, 89, who lives in a nearby convent and works as a hospital chaplain. “Then I will usually buy a medium French fries. I love the salt and the sweet. And that’s what you get here too — the salt and sweet of humanity.”
It is hard to know what the tourists make of the mix. They come from Pennsylvania Station, just off the train; from Times Square; and from the Big Bus New York double-deckers that stop outside for passengers to use the bathroom.
At various times over the last few months, two young people speaking French were observed sitting next to a slurring couple arguing loudly about how neither of them needed this relationship; three people from Australia with two suitcases studied a map of the city, oblivious to anything going on around them because it was pretty much what they expected in New York, this Gotham City they have seen in the movies; and an Israeli mother clung to her daughter in the bathroom, as a regular knocked on a stall with two other regulars inside, telling them to hurry up because there was a line.
In the women’s bathroom on a recent Tuesday afternoon, one of the stalls reeked like a blend of burned marshmallows and plastic — possibly from someone smoking synthetic marijuana, known as “K2” or “spice,” or crack cocaine. A woman who walked into the stall said it smelled like K2. “Let me tell you,” she said. “My boyfriend did it. He was up all night. He thought he was gonna die.”
A mother and a daughter from Florida, each in hot-pink tennis shoes and just off a tourist bus, wrinkled their noses.
“You know, I don’t think I could live in this again,” said the mother, who used to live in Brooklyn.
A version of this article appears in print on July 20, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A McDonald’s With Many Off-the-Menu Sales . Order Reprints|  Today's Paper|Subscribe