[
EVG photos taken on April 8]
Nice Guy Eddie's made their closure public this week on Facebook. The 16-year-old bar's last day is Sunday.
As Eater reported in April, the CB3/SLA committee OK'd the transfer of assets from the David McWater-owned Nice Guy Eddie's on Avenue A at Houston/East First Street to an entity called Downtown Dining LLC led by Darin Rubell of the Gallery Bar. Plans call for a restaurant serving "American comfort food."
An EV Grieve reader who was at the April meeting noted that Rubell was noncommittal about keeping the Kiss mural on the restaurant's south wall along East First Street. (There was something to do with the size of the new windows for the space
or something.) It
seems rather unlikely that the mural would remain... As
Greg at Eater put it, "That sweet, sweet Kiss mural will probably be the first thing to go."
While I like Kiss (well,
mostly) and Chico's work, I don't have strong feelings about the mural ... or the bar... was never a place that I went to very often, if at all in the last 10-plus years. Still, I know people who do like it. (The bar and the mural.) Ditto for the burger on the Avenue A side.
If the mural does go... the entry points into the neighborhood have dramatically changed ... 14th Street and Avenue A is, for now,
an empty lot ...
[
EVG reader Tom]
Astor Place will be a (the?) Death Star...
And Avenue A and Houston with a new restaurant on the northwest corner and
the Union Market on the northeast corner...