
A snapshot of today's weather on St. Mark's Place this afternoon ... photo(s) by Steven...

The building was in terrible condition ... It’s been such an exercise in zen and archaeology. As much as we’ve been trying to maintain it, you couldn’t keep everything. We were lucky on their closing night that we didn’t all fall through. Every time we look behind a wall it’s been a major repair. It’s been an endless process.
The tight horseshoe bar where W. H. Auden and Allen Ginsberg (and possibly Leon Trotsky) once presided has been given a rubdown, though it has been moved about 20 feet and now stands in the center of the space. Also still there are the battered awning, an old wooden phone booth and an exotic mural from the place’s earlier days as a burlesque cabaret.
The resurrection could not have happened without Robert Ehrlich, the snack-food mogul who created Pirate’s Booty, who decided to buy the building and preserve the bar.
The building was in terrible condition ... It’s been such an exercise in zen and archaeology. As much as we’ve been trying to maintain it, you couldn’t keep everything. We were lucky on their closing night that we didn’t all fall through. Every time we look behind a wall it’s been a major repair. It’s been an endless process.
They said they hope their restaurant will echo the restaurants that have disappeared, with a menu offering those foods New Yorkers "miss" like Shepard’s Pie and fish 'n’ chips.
According to Corcoran broker Dan Brady, who held the listing with his colleague Nick Arnold, Mr. Ehrlich will not be moving in. Instead, he plans to keep the space as is: four floor-through apartments with a commercial unit on the ground floor. Will there be a Pirate Shop occupying the hallowed, beer-baptized grounds of the former Holiday Cocktail Lounge? A Pirate Bar? A bar with pirate booty snacks? Whatever it is, it probably won’t hold a candle to the timeless bacchanal that was the Holiday Cocktail Lounge.
[L]ike many Manhattan dives the Holiday Lounge had its writers.
For years Allen Ginsberg had a large apartment in a building almost directly across the street, and he and other Beat writers like Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Herbert Huncke spent considerable time with the bookies, dope dealers, working girls and alcoholics for whom the Holiday was a second home.