In the late 1970s, Ludwika Mickevicius left her native Poland for New York City in search of opportunity. She started tending bar in the East Village and became a beloved figure in the neighborhood.
It wasn’t always easy — all those 4 a.m. nights, seven days a week, slinging boilermaker after boilermaker — but she had been working hard since she was a girl. While growing up on a farm about 50 miles from Bialystok, she milked the cows, tended the geese and helped with the potato harvest. After that she worked in a textile factory.
In the East Village, she was an unlikely den mother to her regulars, who called her Lucy. That became the bar’s name after its previous owner sold the business to her in the 1980s. She ran the place for more than four decades.
“I never thought I’d one day have a bar and end up selling alcohol,” Ms. Mickevicius, 84, said. “But you can’t control life.”
As the East Village underwent a transformation from gritty hamlet to fashionable district, Lucy’s stayed exactly the same — a homey dive along Tompkins Square Park with two pool tables, a jukebox, a graffiti-covered bathroom and the occasional vodka shot on the house.
Ms. Mickevicius operated the bar for years on a casual, month-to-month lease. But after the building was sold over a year ago for $19 million, the new landlord more than doubled the rent. Lucy’s sat dark and empty behind an iron gate.
“I couldn’t make that rent,” she said. “But I’d had enough. I started working when I was 15 as a girl in Poland. I worked my whole life. I was tired of being screwed all the time.”
As Ms. Mickevicius warmed up to the idea of sliding into an unexpected retirement, people in the neighborhood mourned the demise of their favorite dive. That’s when Jon Neidich’s phone started blowing up.
“Did you hear about Lucy’s?”
“Can’t you do something?”
As the chief executive of Golden Age Hospitality, Mr. Neidich, 43, runs a chic downtown empire that includes the Le Dive in Dimes Square and the Nines piano bar, where a caviar potato costs $99. That would seem to put him a long way from Lucy’s — but 18 years ago, when he was an aspiring actor, he started living above the bar and became a regular.
He grew close with Ms. Mickevicius, despite their vastly different backgrounds — he’s a son of Upper East Side privilege — and he even helped out from time to time, working as her barback in what was his first gig in the hospitality industry.
So when he learned that Lucy’s was closing, he approached the landlord and cut a deal. But as word got out that he was planning a renovation, the local grief turned to local panic. Some people in the neighborhood worried that he might fancy the place up until it was drained of all character. EV Grieve, an East Village news blog, reported on developments as if covering Watergate. A typical commenter predicted that Mr. Neidich would bring in “noisy tourists” and “pretentious patrons.”
“I know what people say when they hear someone like me is taking over a place like this,” he said.
Construction paper covered the windows until the work was done. On a recent night, a crowd of Lucy’s regulars was among those invited to the reopening party. Aside from a few touch-ups — a young mustached bartender wearing a bucket cap, an overhaul of the water-stained ceiling — the divey-ness of the place had been preserved. Dusty softball league trophies still lined the walls. The Rolling Stones still played on the jukebox. Even the bathroom graffiti had been left intact.
Kristi Lowery, a longtime regular, sat at the bar nursing a drink. “I moved here from South Carolina with a few girlfriends in 1993, and then some friends took us to Lucy’s,” she said. “The reason Lucy’s is special is Lucy herself. She gave me the courage to live in New York City. She’s been like a mother to so many of us.”
At 10 p.m., the gnarled door swung open. Wearing a winter coat and walking with the help of a cane, Ms. Mickevicius entered. Everybody cheered. Mr. Neidich looked on with a smile as her old customers greeted her with hugs. She ordered a gin and tonic and posed for selfies.
“Tonight is like the old days,” she said. “I like being on other side of the bar. I poured drinks enough. I worked my whole life already.” Speaking of Mr. Neidich, she added, “I’m grateful to Jonny for opening it again. Nice and new now.”
Mr. Neidich was over by the jukebox.
“Places like Lucy’s are disappearing in New York, which is why I’m adamant this remains Lucy’s,” he said. “Luckily, I’m in a place in my career where I could take it over and help. Sure, if you want to order a martini here now, you’ll be able to get one. But we’re still using normal ice cubes here, not large ones.”
Mr. Neidich made Ms. Mickevicius an employee of Golden Age Hospitality, setting her up with a salary, benefits and health insurance. He said it was his way of helping someone who had toiled for decades in a cash business that can leave little in the way of retirement security. She can also tend bar anytime she wants.
“Saving the bar was part of it, but it’s also about making sure Lucy still has a livelihood,” he said. “She’s even got a 20 percent stake in the thing if it does well. As everyone says, what makes Lucy’s special is Lucy.”
‘My Baby’
Two weeks earlier, Mr. Neidich and Ms. Mickevicius met at Lucy’s to check on the renovation. As construction workers completed the new wheelchair-accessible bathroom, she nodded approvingly at the installation of a beer tap now offering Zywiec, a Polish beer she had long served in bottles. Mr. Neidich examined boxes filled with the ephemera that had once decorated the room, from red Chinese paper lanterns to neon signs.
Suddenly, Ms. Mickevicius fetched a letter from her bag and handed it to him.
“Do I need lawyer?” she asked.
Mr. Neidich looked it over. “No, this is a phishing scam,” he said. “Don’t hire any lawyers. Any time you get something like this from now on, send it to us. We’ll look at it for you, OK?”
They reminisced about the days when he was a would-be actor and she was in her vodka-slinging prime.
“He was my baby,” she said. “I was his mother. He was always playing at pool table.”
“That was my favorite stool, remember, Luce?” he said. “I can’t even say how many hours I must have spent there. Remember Rasta Peter? Always drinking Guinness and Hennessy?”
She talked about running the place when her customers were punks and skinheads. She remembered the Tompkins Square Park riots of 1988. A man once ran into Lucy’s to escape a gang, and she defended him like a human shield while the attackers smashed bottles against the bar.
“I survived skinheads, punkies with big dogs, buildings that fell down,” Ms. Mickevicius said. “So many times I slept on stools here at night. I did everything for years and years. No life, only work.”
“First I was sad after my bar closed, and missed my work, but now I love not having to work,” she added. “I am free. Finally, I buy a drink for somebody now.”
The eldest of seven siblings, Ms. Mickevicius was born in 1942 near Grajewo, Poland, and later lived in a river town, Augustow. Her grandfather told her bedtime stories about how as the First World War ended he developed frostbite on his nose while walking from Russia to France in the bitter cold. At 19, after having helped out on the farm and worked in the fabric factory, she married a bridge engineer, Jozef, and they had two children.
“Jozef was a beautiful man,” she said. “He had a car called ‘Warsaw.’ My mother liked him. We married. Had a good life. Then everything happened.”
As she found opportunity in America while her family stayed behind in Poland, she endured a series of personal misfortunes. Jozef died from a heart attack. Then her son, 30 at the time, was attacked by a street gang and left paralyzed. Her daughter was later badly injured in a car accident. For years she traveled back and forth to help take care of her family.
Mr. Neidich, by contrast, was the son of a real estate financier. In the summers he helped host cocktail parties in East Hampton with his mother, the jeweler and philanthropist Brooke Garber Neidich. After graduating from Brown, he tried acting and immersed himself in the city’s nightlife scene. He managed Le Bain and the Boom Boom Room before co-founding Acme.
After their inspection of the renovation work at Lucy’s, Mr. Neidich escorted her outside and called an Uber to take her back to the nearby rent-regulated apartment where she has lived for 25 years.
Then he walked a few blocks to Monsieur, a bar he had just opened in a partnership with the film director Baz Luhrmann. Vogue magazine was hosting a party there in a few hours that would be attended by Sabrina Carpenter, Adrien Brody and Anna Wintour, and he needed to check on the preparations.
“Lucy hasn’t had an easy life,” he said, walking through the cold. “It’s no surprise the bar became her life. This all started as a passion project to save the bar, but it feels like the right thing to look out for her, too. She’s welcome to pour drinks at the new Lucy’s anytime, but I want to make sure she doesn’t ever have to work again, if she doesn’t want to.”
‘Let’s Take a Shot’
A few hours before the recent reopening of Lucy’s, Mr. Neidich was keeping Ms. Mickevicius company in her apartment, the two of them seated side by side on a tufted dark red couch. The living room curtains were tightly shut. The only light came from a lamp without a shade. A tapestry of Pope John Paul II hung on a wall near a cabinet filled with bottles of Eastern European spirits and photos of her children.
“My pope, he was Polish,” Ms. Mickevicius said. “I’m Catholic. It’s nice. If you do right, no one can touch you, if you’re Catholic.”
She was getting used to retirement, she added. Now she had time to visit old friends in Greenpoint and stroll down the boardwalk in Brighton Beach. In a quiet moment, she looked back on her past.
“Life is suffering,” she said. “That’s why I think I liked to make people happy, running the bar. I’ve had to be positive. Because I would go crazy otherwise.”
A silence followed.
“Let’s take a shot,” she said.
As she fetched a bottle of honey-flavored liqueur from the cabinet, Mr. Neidich explained that he had given up drinking years ago.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “You don’t drink anymore?”
“No. It used to work for me. Not anymore. It’s like that for some people.”
“Not even just one drink?”
“No.”
Lucy shrugged and raised her glass.
“Nastrovia,” she said.
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