Remembering the Navy Yard Cocktail Lounge

On Monday, Gothamist had a post on the new Brooklyn Roasting Company that opened at the former home of the Navy Yard Cocktail Lounge ... at Flushing and Washington Avenues opposite an entrance to the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

We had been to the place, which was built in 1907, a few times... and, despite being way out of bounds in terms of typical EVG coverage, we decided to write about it in November 2010 upon hearing that the bar closed.

An excerpt.

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[A]t first glance inside the Navy Yard, the place seems like your average rundown neighborhood bar. A few regulars are milling about, playing pool. The bartender is cordial. (I'm sort of blending the different trips into one post here....it was always the same.) WBLS is on a little too loudly on the radio. The TV is also on seemingly just as loud — one of those CBS shows that I've never watched on Thursday nights. (CSINCS?)

Eventually around 10 p.m., a lot more women are suddenly in the bar... they walk in, talk with the bartender, spend a lot of time in the women's room. Soon, there are anywhere from five to 10 women va-va-va-vooming around in lingerie, bikinis, etc. Oh! They're all very outgoing, especially when there are just two of you in the bar.

Every few minutes Delicious or Cinnamon or Diamond walks up and asks again if you'd like a dance. No thanks! Two minutes later... There's not much of a chance of sitting here for, say, a few hours drinking without purchasing a $10 dance. (And they don't have change for a $20, oddly enough.) So just sit there in your stool at the bar for the lapdance and wonder why Laurence Fishburne decided to do CSINCS.

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Oh, and here how the place is looking today...


[Photo via Gothamist]

Previously on EV Grieve:
At the Navy Yard Cocktail Lounge (aka, RIP)

Video tribute to the lost bars and restaurants of 2010

It's the time of year for, um, Year in Reviews... Jeremiah Moss checks in with some of the big losses from 2010 ... Meanwhile, BoweryBoogie takes a look at a few of the Lower East Side eateries that quickly flamed out...

And the folks at Grade "A" Fancy have gone cinematic with their tribute to the lost joints of NYC this past year... As Karen and Jon write, "The city will be poorer for the loss. Each of these had its own unique charms, but we relied on all of them to temporarily shut out the horrors of the homogenized Disneyfication New Yorkers have all had to endure over the last decade or so."

Now to their video...

Hickey's is gone

For some reason, I found myself near Herald Square Friday evening. Enough to make anyone want to drink. Hickey's! Of course!



So I made my way over to 33rd Street near Seventh Avenue ... to the well-worn 40-year-old bar that I'll drink in any chance that I have...



Ahhhhh!. I have no idea when this happened. Another one lost. Of course, this closure has been rumored for years.

A few doors to the east, that suburbany-looking place called Stoudt NYC was MOBBED. So I went into the OK-at-the-right-time Blarney Stone next door. This was NOT the right time: Pre-Knicks game crowd. So I found a slot near the front door. An array of half-finished drinks sat there on a table next to me. A woman wondered in. I'm pretty sure she was carrying a glass of red wine in with her. She put down her wine. She started wolfing down the different drinks. Two half-empty bottles of Magners. And something that might have been a screwdriver. She asked if that was my bottle of beer. Yes it was. She nodded, picked up her wine and walked back out the door.

I felt a little better about Hickey's for a moment.

Read more about Hickey's at Jeremiah's Vanishing New York .... At A Guy Walks into 365 Bars, our friend Marty Wombacher wrote: "Hickey's is one of the last great dive bars in Manhattan. Stop by for a drink or four and let's keep this joint in existence!" You can read his recap here.

[Top photo via Jeremiah's Vanishing New York]

At the Navy Yard Cocktail Lounge (aka, RIP)

In his post yesterday on the documentary "New York Dive," Jeremiah linked to a Brownstoner item that the Navy Yard Cocktail Lounge on Flushing Avenue in Brooklyn had recently been shuttered and gutted.

This was news to me.

Sure enough, the Times had an item about it on Sunday:

The Navy Yard Cocktail Lounge, a dive at Flushing and Washington Avenues opposite an entrance to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, was a bastion of grit. Scantily clad dancers would gyrate for tips as patrons sipped inexpensive drinks and shot pool. But the area has become more upscale, and when the building with the bar was sold, said Steve Frankel, who owned the bar for 11 years, the lounge’s days were over. “That bar was a real-deal place, built in 1907, and now they’ve gutted it,” he said. “All that history down the drain.”

I've heard about the bar through the years — in rather mythical proportions, too. Sketchy! Dangerous! Anything goes! Quite the legend. In any event, I had never taken the time to go. Navy Yard had been on the endangered list since the building first hit the market in February 2009, as Grub Street reported.

I did make it out there a few times this year with the long-lost Intern of EV Grieve. I planned to write about it one of these days, though never got around to it seeing as it was far off the usual EVG beat. Didn't realize that the post would be an obituary.

The first thing I remember seeing walking up to the bar — just across the street.



Anyway, at first glance inside the Navy Yard, the place seems like your average rundown neighborhood bar. A few regulars are milling about, playing pool. The bartender is cordial. (I'm sort of blending the different trips into one post here....it was always the same.) WBLS is on a little too loudly on the radio. The TV is also on seemingly just as loud — one of those CBS shows that I've never watched on Thursday nights. (CSINCS?)

Eventually around 10 p.m., a lot more women are suddenly in the bar... they walk in, talk with the bartender, spend a lot of time in the women's room. Soon, there are anywhere from five to 10 women va-va-va-vooming around in lingerie, bikinis, etc. Oh! They're all very outgoing, especially when there are just two of you in the bar.

Every few minutes Delicious or Cinnamon or Diamond walks up and asks again if you'd like a dance. No thanks! Two minutes later... There's not much of a chance of sitting here for, say, a few hours drinking without purchasing a $10 dance. (And they don't have change for a $20, oddly enough.) So just sit there in your stool at the bar for the lapdance and wonder why Laurence Fishburne decided to do CSINCS.

There's steady drinking. No one is smashed. It's not amateur hour. There's a no-nonsense, studied drinking going on. I always expect it to get fratastic, though that never happens these nights.

I wanted to take some photos of the dancers, though thought better of it. I think Steve is giving me funny looks down the way. I did take some more innocuous photos.





















I asked the Intern of EV Grieve for his notes too:

• The drink list: Thug Passion, Incredible Hulk (which a dancer told me is "sweet")
• The old school kitchen refrigerators
• Approximately 8 security monitors
• Pool table, punching bag machine and the stage that they only use for "special occasions"
• A sign behind the bar that listed prices for top, middle and bottom shelves, literally
• The bathroom has a super-long corridor with mirror in the corner, I guess so you can see if you're about to be stabbed or raided by the cops
• There was a posted time limit on the bathroom doors. Two minutes? And I think a no-gambling sign.
• 23 and over to enter... two-drink minimum.
• The tile floor
• The wood paneling

"God that place is great," the intern said.

Yes, was.

Incidentally, the item on the Navy Yard from the Sunday Times ran with a piece on The Fetch Club, "a haven for pampered pooches, fills a space where Fulton Fish Market smells once wafted. There is certainly no odor in this deluxe dormitory for dogs — the air is ionized and purified. The water is filtered, and the food is organic."

In the paper's Chronicle of a Changing City feature. Changing, indeed.

Then after the Aqueduct

After the races, you may want to sample the local bar scene across the street in the South Ozone Park neighborhood...

Unfortunately, all of our favorites are gone. Was dismayed to see on Thanksgiving that Guy's of Vinegar Hill (on the left below)...



...is now this charmless-looking spot. And it wasn't open on Thanksgiving afternoon...



The worst, though. Several years ago, the Winners Circle on Rockaway Boulevard and 112th Street...



...became a custom-made kitchen counter shop...



...further along Rockaway Boulevard is the Tropical Nights, where you can watch live cricket matches. The Trop was also closed on Thanksgiving afternoon...

Very bad things: Blarney Stone still closed on Fulton Street

No sign of any activity. If my math is correct, they've been closed now for 18 days.

Previously.

The Blarney Stone is still closed

Perhaps they'll reopen in time to capitalize on the Yankees World Series victory parade Friday morning.

Previously.

The bar at Cedar Tavern is moving to Austin, Texas

Grub Street's Daniel Maurer has the scoop on the fate of the beloved Cedar Tavern on University Place. No surprise. "Longtime owner Mike Diliberto now confirms with us that he won’t be reopening the Cedar. “As much as I know it’s going to be missed,” he says, “I think putting a bar beneath a condominium doesn’t do much for the value.” Oh, and the actual turn-of-the-century bar that we loved to stare at was sold to some nightlife types in Austin, Texas.

I just had to look (but you don't have to)

Found myself on the Upper West Side yesterday afternoon...As you know, the P & G Cafe at Amsterdam Avenue and 73rd Street closed on Jan. 31...and is moving to a new location. Brooks at Lost City had a photo of the iconic neon sign being removed from the building last week...

This is what is used to look like...



I knew it would be ugly...but I walked by anyway.



Ugh. Nothing is left inside, of course. I still looked. While I was peaking inside, another fellow stopped and took it all in. "Wow," he said.

Yes.

Check out Ken Mac's photos of the P & G (how we will remember it) at Greenwich Village Daily Photo.

Alex also paid his respects this weekend over at Flaming Pablum.

(Jumping ahead to) Day 7: The Blarney Stone is still closed

The fellows at the shoe repair shop next door are equally mystified as to why the Blarney Stone isn't open...and they said it closed last Friday, not Monday as I previously thought. Commenter Stewie at Eater mentioned yesterday that several businesses along this stretch of Fulton Street have had problems with water pipes of late. True...a very likely cause for a closing. However, looking in the BS's back entrance on Ann Street, nothing looks out of place. No signs of construction...or work of any kind. One minor thing: The five pieces of tape on the front gate -- from which a sign had been telling us what was what? -- are now gone...

Day 4: The Blarney Stone is still closed

Day 3: The Blarney Stone is still closed

At the Holland Bar yesterday afternoon

Uh, still not open yet. And the gate was down.

On Tuesday, the Times ran a feature saying the Ninth Avenue dive might be open as soon as the next day! Seemed awfully optimistic, especially given the state of the place that I saw the previous week. At that time, two weeks even seemed like a stretch to for the bar to reopen.

In any event, the place will be open again...just don't know when for sure.

Oh, España en Llamas, I didn't get to say goodbye

On my way back from the Holland, I turned left on 36th Street off Ninth Avenue. I guess I didn't realize this place had closed. Hadn't been inside España en Llamas in a few years. I usually stuck with the Holland or the Bellevue in these parts. Too bad. I liked this place. Last time I was there, a drunken fellow tried to pick a fight with me for no reason. A few beers later, he had his arm around me. Friends, for no reason.

New York Press did a proper piece on the place back in May 2006. (No byline on it -- Joshua Bernstein's work? Updated: Yes, Josh wrote this...had confirmation.) This is about as accurate as you can be in describing the place:

At the western end, there's a signless storefront with a door falling off its hinge. It's beyond nondescript, a spot that could house a numbers hall or an ersatz squat. The storefront's smudged window, though, contains the key clue: a neon Budweiser sign nearly as old as neon.

“That's the type of bar where you can disappear,” a stranger said one day, motioning to the sign.

At the time, my roommate was ambling behind said gentleman. Words piqued ears, and I was later relayed the story.

“No one will ever find you,” he said. “It's like falling off the face of the earth.”

And:

In the darkened rear room, which is stocked with mountains of Budweiser cases, construction workers gather 'round a video-poker machine. A middle-aged couple sits beside them, tongue-kissing. Are they adulterers? Who knows. Who will find out?

Hmm. Damn. Hate to see places like this go. Oh, it did seem as if something was happening inside, like some construction, though I didn't spot any permits. Never struck me as the place that would close for renovations, though.

Happening by the Holland

Since Jeremiah broke the news on Nov. 4 that the Holland may be gone for good, there has been plenty of chitchat among my circle of friends about the bar. Meanwhile, Brooks paid a visit to the getting-gutted bar and passed along some possibly good news that the Holland may reopen in the new year. By pure randomness, I happened to be by the ass-end of Port Authority Friday after work. I walked by the Holland on Ninth Avenue. It wasn't pretty.





Three workers were carrying crap out of the Holland basement and tossing it into the dumpster. Nothing was left inside the space where the bar was. And the workers didn't seem all that pleased that I was nosing around.

RIP Holland Bar

Ugh. Jeremiah reports today that the Holland Bar on Ninth Avenue near 39th Street at the ass-end of Port Authority is now closed. Arguably the best lonely old man bar in the city. I could go on about the double-whammy of hitting the Holland and the neighboring Bellevue (which is now Duff's in Williamsburg) for an afternoon or evening. Last time I went to the Holland, the bartender asked me if I wanted some snacks. They had tortilla chips! I politely declined, but he insisted. I watched him struggle with opening the sealed bag. He dumped some into a plastic bowl for me. Despite coming from a freshly opened bag, the chips were soggy. Beyond stale. It just seemed perfect.

[Photo by Shanna Ravindra/New York]

Appreciating NYC's drinking past (and present)

I enjoyed Off the Presses author Robert Simonson's article in the Sun yesterday titled "Looking at New York's Liquid Past." Here's his look at Times Square:

Walk to Broadway and down two blocks south to the Crossroads of the World. Unsurprisingly, a lot of drinking history occurred at this intersection. On the southeast corner of Seventh Avenue and 42nd Street, you can still see the Mansard-roofed beauty that once was the Knickerbocker Hotel. The bar was so favored a watering hole of uptown swells in the first two decades of the 20th century that it was called the 42nd Street Country Club. (It was also the original home of Parrish's "Old King Cole" oil painting.) Its main importance in cocktail history, though, lies in the once-prevalent claim that its head bartender, Martini di Arma di Taggia, invented the martini in 1912. This is balderdash, since mentions of the drink had been appearing in print for decades prior to that. But give ol' di Taggia a quick salute, anyway.

Directly opposite Broadway was the Hotel Metropole, another popular way station for actors, politicians, and the like. Its house cocktail was the Metropolitan, which is basically a Manhattan, but with brandy standing in for the rye. It hasn't retained the fame the Manhattan has but is still a damned decent drink.

He also provides some nice details about current haunts such as the Algonquin and King Cole Bar.

Minetta Tavern is one of Esquire magazine's "Best Bars in America"

I noticed the coverlines on the June issue of Esquire touting its next installment of the "Best bars in America" feature. Was a little curious to see if they picked any bars in the neighborhood, some place the editorial assistants told the bosses to include. (Which may explain why/how my beloved Grassroots was picked in 2006.) Anyway, I went to their Web site today to check out the list. I saw where Minetta Tavern made the list at No. 6! Deserving! But who wants to tell them that the place closed last week? (Perhaps this is last year's list...though the home page does have the June cover subject, Barack Obama, featured....)

Meanwhile, someone should also tell the good people at Citysearch the same news.