Good morning. It’s Thursday. Today we’ll say goodbye to a real-life New York bar where everybody knows your name, even if you’re new in town. We’ll also get details on a move to mandate air-conditioning for tenants.
New York can seem daunting when you are new here. You can feel bewildered and lonely in a city of 8,258,035 people where 8,258,034 of them are strangers. Wherever you go as you learn your way around, you think you are the odd person out. You think there’s some secret local code you just can’t crack.
And then you discover a place where you are comfortable.
For Ashwin Bharke, 27, whose job brought him to Manhattan from London in January, that place was Neary’s, a bar and restaurant on East 57th Street. It’s an artifact from a now-distant New York with wood paneling on the walls and red banquettes in the back, along with regulars who have been bellying up to the bar for 30 or 40 years.
“It’s got the charm of a Fitzgerald novel, the warmth of a home-cooked meal and the most eclectic crowd of people,” Bharke said.
He was the newest of newcomers, and he was welcomed.
“Cheers,” the sitcom about another bar where everybody knew your name, ended in 1993 after 11 years on the air. In real-life New York, it has been two and a half years since the death of Jimmy Neary, the Irish immigrant who opened Neary’s 57 years ago. And “old New York” bars never seem to last much longer than the proprietor whose personality defined the place as much as the drinks or the often heavy-on-the-cholesterol food.
So for Bharke, the question is: “Where will I go now?” Neary’s is closing on Friday.
A real estate deal is involved, as is so often the case when the lights are turned out and the front door is locked one last time. Neary’s four grown children are selling the building, which he had the foresight to buy in 1986. Owning the building helped during the pandemic, when other bars struggled to pay rent.
But Neary’s has been a strain for Una Neary, the member of the family most involved with Neary’s since her father’s death. She started working in the coat room when she was 12 and persuaded him to promote her to waitress when she was 13. Now, though, she has a day job on Wall Street.
She and her siblings put the building on the market several months ago to “see what’s out there,” she said. They decided to sell to two brothers who are restaurateurs. She would not identify them or say how much they were paying. She said they had promised to open “a more modern Irish-themed restaurant” within six months.
But it will not be called Neary’s.
In a few days, she will take down the photographs of people like Bill Clinton, both Presidents Bush, Cardinal Edward Dolan and former Gov. Hugh Carey. Some of the people who have worked there for years will retire, like Liz Farrelly, a hostess whom Una Neary called “our Queen Elizabeth.” She was hired three months after Neary’s opened in 1967 and is now 84.
And people like Annie Engelsen, who said on Tuesday that she had been there in those early days, will dine out — elsewhere — on their Neary’s stories. “I wasn’t the first customer,” she said, but Neary “had nobody” when she started coming in.
Neary himself said, in 2016, that the first year was “mediocre, not bad” — until the night he was puzzled about why, suddenly, there was a crowd. “I heard customers at the bar saying, ‘He doesn’t know who’s here,’” Neary recalled. “Who was sitting in the corner? John Glenn. And I said to myself, ‘If I wasn’t in business another week, I still had the first man to orbit the earth in my restaurant.’” (Glenn was actually the first American to circle the earth.)
For the Neary’s crowd, it will soon be time to face the question Bharke asked: Where will they go now?
“We don’t know,” said Kaitlyn Corbin, who discovered Neary’s during a snowstorm in 2022 with her then-boyfriend, John Skinner, who said they had tried “hip places in the Meatpacking District,” but “it’s not the same.” Neary’s has been such a touchstone for them that Skinner went there with Corbin’s father for lunch before he proposed to her. The wedding is scheduled for Sept. 7. Una Neary has R.S.V.P.’d.
Bharke works for Bloomberg L.P., the company co-founded by Michael Bloomberg before he was the mayor.
“I’ve never met him,” Bhakre said. But after hearing that Neary’s was closing, he emailed Bloomberg.
“I’m tearing up writing this,” he told Bloomberg, who has himself been a Neary’s customer for more than four decades. “Una mentioned you might pop in on Thursday. If so, would love to say hi.” This was after Bhakre had said that his parents had said that the next time they visited New York, they would like to go to Neary’s “and say ‘thank you for taking care of our son, for making him so happy.’”
As of Wednesday afternoon, Bhakre had not heard back from Bloomberg, who was apparently out of the office. But he figured he could swing by the former mayor’s desk today.
Or just catch him at Neary’s.
Weather
So much for the extreme heat. Today will be a mostly sunny day with temperatures in the high 80s. The evening will be partly cloudy, with temperatures dropping to the high 60s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
In effect until Aug. 13 (Tisha B’Av).
The latest Metro news
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Menendez’s future: Senator Robert Menendez was found guilty of bribery and corruption. Leaders in his party are pressuring him to resign or face the possibility of a rare expulsion vote.
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Council member bit police: Wenyi Susan Zhuang faces assault charges after a protest at the Brooklyn site of a proposed men’s shelter where, authorities said, she resisted arrest and bit a police chief.
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A Manhattan meteor?: It had already been a weird few weeks in New York. Then a fireball streaked across the sky.
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Infant death: A New Jersey man was charged in the death of his 8-week-old daughter, whom, prosecutors said, he had left alone in his car for an extended period on a day when temperatures reached the mid-90s.
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A center of art and protest: ABC No Rio, a cultural center on the Lower East Side, broke ground on a new building to replace the tenement it operated out of for more than 40 years.
A proposal to mandate air-conditioning for renters
Landlords have to keep tenants warm in the winter, but can leave them sweating in the summer. Lincoln Restler, a city councilman from Brooklyn, wants to change that.
He plans to introduce a bill today to update the housing code to require landlords to buy, install and maintain air-conditioners or cooling systems for tenants during the summer, with fines of as much as $1,250 a day for building owners who do not comply. The bill would apply to high-rises, walk-ups and multifamily buildings, including those owned by the city.
“This will save lives as we reckon with the challenges of the climate crisis,” Mr. Restler said.
Every summer, about 350 New Yorkers die from heat-related illnesses, according to the city’s health department. Black New Yorkers are twice as likely to die from heat as white residents, and a lack of home air-conditioning is a major driver of heat-stress deaths.
Property owners questioned the cost, among other things. “Financial penalties are already exacerbating a high-operating-cost environment we have in New York,” said Jay Martin, the executive director of the Community Housing Improvement Program, a landlord group.
Though city data from 2017 showed that 91 percent of New York City households had air-conditioning, Mayor Eric Adams, who was born in Brooklyn and raised in Queens, told reporters on Tuesday that “everyday New Yorkers don’t have air-conditioners” and that he had grown up without them. He joked that his mother would tell him to put his head in the refrigerator on hot days.
But times have changed, some experts say. “The increasing number of days with above-average temperatures means that the lack of air-conditioning can be a matter of life and death,” said Sheila Foster, a professor at the Columbia Climate School.
METROPOLITAN diary
Rainy Day
Dear Diary:
I was on my way home in the rain after an emotional therapy session. I knew my eyes were red, so I put on my sunglasses for the walk to the subway.
As I walked along the platform watching for my train, I noticed other passengers looking at me.
“Come on,” I thought to myself, “this is New York City. Surely you’ve seen people wearing shaded glasses in the subway before.”
Then I realized my umbrella was still open.
— Sylvia Feinman
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Send submissions here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Melissa Guerrero and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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The post Regulars Mourn Neary’s, an Old-Time Bar That’s Closing appeared first on New York Times.
