Well, we knew this one was coming. As we've been noting, many businesses on East 14th Street between Avenue A and Avenue B are either relocating or closing to make way for some yet-unspecified development.
Bartenders at the Blarney Cove are now telling patrons that they will close at the end of the month. It's not relocating. (How could this ever be replicated elsewhere anyway?)
It Was Her New York wrote about the Blarney Cove and this stretch of East 14th Street yesterday.
[T]he further east we got the worse things look. It was like Close Encounters of the Third Kind when Richard Dreyfuss slips into the restricted area and all these dead cows are lying around.
Every store was empty with 'For Rent' or 'Going Out Of Business'. The cheap place was gone. 40 years of buying necessary and unnecessary affordable shit, gone.
Previously on EV Grieve:
East 14th Street exodus continues
The disappearing storefronts of East 14th Street
[Updated with correction] 8-lot parcel of East 14th Street primed for new development
Bargain Express has closed on East 14th Street
11 comments:
When I start to feel bad about leaving the East Village it seems another story like this pops up to remind me it's no longer the East Village I loved and my memories are far better than the current reality.
Now THIS is sadness. That's it. The end of Weird in NYC. The Eastern end of 14th was all that was left.
Now I cry.
Nothing is forever! We all need to remember this from day to day. We and everything around us is temporary.
Glad I got to experience and document bars like Blarney Cove, Mars Bar, Stoned Crow, Bill's Gay '90's, etc. It sure won't be the same when I come back in October. Will someone please have a final drink for me in there before it closes? And then throw the glass at the window at the IHOP across the street.
This one makes me feel I'm losing my awesomely crazy grandparents...beyond depressing.
Once apon a time long ago there was Barasinis (the stuyvesant town convience store) next was a toy store. next was the beauty salon.then was the woolworths,next the blarney cove bar.then the jewelery store,next was a discount store.then the red apple supermarket. and charlie's, this was the early 90's . A time that i sorely miss. Now the neighborhood is just a fake playground for the overprivlidged.
New York City is DYING. One venue at at a time....
None of this shit would be possible without the generous "assistance" (read compliance) by the city, which allows zoning variances, tax abatements and all sorts of generous incentives for developers to build non-descript homogenous structures for the super wealthy whose presence in our "edgy" neighborhood destroys the very thing they claim to be attracted to.
Developers could not and would not overbuild without the assistance from the city to MAKE IT happen!!
I never entered the Blarney Cove (I don't drink), but I've always been glad that's it's just THERE.
I will be sad to see it gone, dreading the ugliness about to take over that stretch of 14th Street....
Who wouldn't love a place where you could screw in the bathroom, get tossed out by the 5'2" lady barmaid (in a Catholic schoolgirl outfit, no less), revel in ecstasy as Murray Hill pups who'd wandered in away from Professor Thoms thinking it would be okay as the frequent flyers nursed their nightlies scratching their head at the Lady Gaga medley over the jukebox, or play Erotic Photo Hunt with your grandmother (out on medical leave)? The Cove had its charm but much like the drained bottles clinking on the bottom of the trashcan, it's just another dead soldier in a war we'll never win or hope to remember. If you guys need me I'll be at Billymark's West trying to make sense of things.
Part of this lament is the utter lack of anyplace "ordinary" -- just a PLACE where one might have a drink, a sandwich, scrambled eggs... now everything is so sanitized, artisanal, overpriced... must everything be an $18 martini? $24 prix fixe brunch? $36 burger? and who are the people who populate these places endlessly?
Oh...that's right. These pricy places come and go because there just are not enough one-percenters to populate them indefinitely!
I had alot of great nights in the Blarn. This is sad. While its been years since I went there, its a sad day for 14th street.
Born and raised in Stuy town 36 years ago, still a resident. The toy store on 14th was Joe-Joes, Rainbow used to be woolworths and the street was always a shi% hole. Now it's just a shi* hole with trust fund babies in "luxury condos"..
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