For a bar called Identity, this place on East Sixth Street between Avenue A and Avenue B sure didn't have one. (You know — Identity.) Two floors of a little bit of anything.
Sports! DJ! Darts! From the outside, it looked like a place you'd find in a suburban strip mall with a crowd to match. (I admit — I was never inside. Still. C'mon.)
But! All this is changing... As we understand it, the owner dismissed his bar staff... and now you'll find four former bartenders from
the recently closed Bar 82 here — Dan, Jackson, Meghan and Nicole.
[The owner] is letting us be the vibe. If we pull its head out of the water we can make it a bar to remember," bartender Jackson Riffe told me via Facebook. "It's an awesome opportunity to keep us together and rock that crazy Bar 82 vibe into the future. Just trying to keep some real Lower East Side culture on the Lower East Side."
So in the coming weeks there be making plans on putting to use the underutilized basement space. Meanwhile, Identity's resident DJ, C2, is gone... and Jackson, who works weekend nights, is now playing the music from behind the bar — "1977-style punk with country songs about booze and drugs, with some 60's hot French go-go music paired with surf songs about the jungle."
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Image via Time Out New York]
