[85 Avenue A]
Arrow Bar, the subterranean space with a good happy hour at 85 Avenue A between East Fifth Street and East Sixth Street, closed last month.
The same owners (who also run Baby's All Right in Williamsburg) have now turned the space into a venue called Elvis Guesthouse. There was a soft opening this past Friday night featuring DJs and the Los Angeles-based punk duo Girlpool. Brooklyn Vegan has a rundown on the show with a lot of photos.
And this arrived in our inbox last week...
On August 16, 1977, the morning after Elvis Presley theoretically met his end on the toilet in Graceland, a chubby man in a white linen suit and an ill-fitting blonde wig bought a one way ticket from Memphis to Istanbul. He paid in cash and used the name John Burrows.
Once he arrived in Turkey, he bounced around the hippie trail, hitchhiking from Tehran to Peshawar, Kabul to Lahore, Delhi to Goa, Kathmandu to Bangkok and Chiang Mai. Instead of staying in the finest hotels, where he would have certainly been noticed, he bunked in guesthouses, small lodgings run by local families and foreign Heads.
In 1979, political changes in the Middle East put an end to the hippie trail. John had grown tired of his nomadic lifestyle and settled on the outskirts of Kathmandu, where he opened a small bar inspired by his years spent in guesthouses. He named it ELVIS GUESTHOUSE.
After the place had been open for a year, John disappeared one day. A gin soaked journalist claimed to have spotted him on the beach in Occupied Cambodia, and others said that he had made his way into the ethnic minority areas of Southwest China. Eventually, the building was demolished to make way for a shopping mall. But a few photos of the bar survived, and we have created its exact replica here.
We haven't heard anything just yet about an official opening date for the bar.
This is a sad closing. There aren't many places that serve the arrow community.
ReplyDeleteIt's obviously a fake biography, but they could have gotten a few things correct. The political changes of 1979 were in Iran, and Iran is not part of the Middle East. (He was OK with the political climate post-1948?) Also, what is Occupied Cambodia?
ReplyDeleteHistory... what's history? Said while texting and never looking up.
ReplyDeleteonly some dumbass millennial could conjure up an image of 1977 elvis hitchhiking through asia
ReplyDelete@7:21 Although the phrase "middle east" is no doubt a Eurocentric term, Iran is indeed often traditionally considered part of that region.
ReplyDeleteOccupied Cambodia refers to the post-Khmer Rouge occupation by the Vietnamese.
Thanks!