Report: Emerald Isle closing on April 30, becoming a Kate Spade store

EVG favorite The Emerald Inn, the Upper West Side saloon that has been serving up drinks since FDR was in office, is officially closing on April 30. The fucking rent increased from $17,500 to $35,000. And because this is the way of NYC these days — a Kate Spade store is taking over the space.

West Side Rag had the scoop. The Times confirmed the closure.

Previously.

Report: Upper West Side old-timer Emerald Inn will likely close for good this spring

Stepping away from the neighborhood for a minute. The Emerald Inn, the Upper West Side saloon that has been serving up drinks since FDR was in office, looks like a goner, again. A huge rent hike nearly killed it a few years back, but the landlord couldn't find a tenant who'd pay $35,000 a month for the 800-square-foot space during the recession.

Now, though. The West Side Rag reports this afternoon that the landlord has already been showing the space to other prospective tenants. As they report: "The unpretentious bar now has some very tony neighbors, including high-end retailers like Helmut Lang and Club Monaco, and rents have escalated."

The current lease is up May 1.

Previously.

H/t Eater

People really seem to like the new Custo Barcelona ad campaign!

Spotted at 70th Street and Columbus Avenue.

You know that grand art-deco Metro Theater at 99th and Broadway that has been closed for a few years?

Yeah, its recent long tortured history (condo! restuarant!) is over. It will now be home to an Urban Outfitters. (New York Post, second item). Finally, local residents won't have to travel so far for their Toddland diver down hoodies!

City Room had an item on the Metro (originally called the Midtown, for some reason) in 2007:

From the outside, the landmark Metro Theater on Broadway, an Art Deco jewel box between 99th and 100th Streets, looks almost as exquisite as it must have in the 1930s, when movies were still known as “photoplays,” though no photo has played there for two years.

But the inside, visible to passers-by on a recent afternoon, has been gutted. Gone are seats and plaster and curtains and screen. Gone is a golden ceiling molding with a chain of floral bouquets. Gone are the sylph-filled niches. Gone is grillework that sprouted like corn stalks.

Here's a little more on the theater's past on Tom Fletcher's New York Architecture

The Midtown, designed by the architecture firm of Boak & Paris, opened in 1933. From 1948 through April 1972, it was part of the Brandt circuit, featuring sub-run foreign and independent fare starting in the 1950s. It exhibited films such as Belle de Jour, Shame (and just about every other Bergman movie), Breathless, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Repulsion, L’Avventura, Straw Dogs, and Gimme Shelter, though never in exclusive engagements. After Brandt's management, it operated as an adult film venue.

It was renamed the Metro in 1982.

FINALLY: Some good bar-related news

The Emerald Inn, the Upper West Side saloon that has been serving up drinks since FDR was in office, will live. And you can thank the recession for it.

In September, manager Charlie Campbell learned that rent would double to nearly $35,000 a month for its 800-square-foot space on Columbus Avenue near 69th Street. (Sidenote: How did he learn of this? He saw the location advertised for lease on the Web site of real estate brokerage CB Richard Ellis. Nice!)

Anyway, according to the Times today:

Like so many other stalwart-but-doomed Manhattan holdouts that have lost their leases under the pressure of gentrification, the Emerald — as its habitués call it — was scheduled to close at the end of April; its rent was to more than double.

But the watering hole . . . has won a two-year lease extension thanks to “the whole down economy, where they can’t find a tenant who will pay that much,” said Mike Campbell, 77, the Emerald’s owner.

Indeed, the reprieve “has to do with the economy — and the kind of people the Campbells are,” said Mike Clarke, an owner of the A. J. Clarke Real Estate Corporation, which manages the five-story apartment building in which the Emerald resides. Mr. Campbell’s son Charlie, 49, manages the bar.

As one patron said, "Columbus Avenue has been turning into a strip mall, with chain stores and restaurants. Maybe the recession will help the mom-and-pops stay in business.”

Finally, a little history on the place via the Times:

Mike Campbell’s father (also Mike) opened the Emerald with his brother William. “Exactly when, we’re not sure, but it was 1943 or 1944,” Charlie Campbell said.

The Emerald has been an enduring link to the West Side’s raffish past, when Columbus and Amsterdam Avenues were populated by gin mills and where brawls among patrons, enthusiastically mediated by bruiser bartenders, were not unusual.

“We were called Spanish Harlem until the ’60s, when they put in Lincoln Center,” said Charlie Campbell. In recent decades, the clientele has gone upscale, to professionals who can afford Upper West Side housing, along with a sprinkling of loyal locals, some of them survivors of the era when “West Side Story” was a contemporary narrative.

Previous Emerald coverage on EV Grieve here.