VANISHED
The Grassroots Tavern had been on St. Mark's Place for
42 years. It closed on New Year's Eve.
The rent was too high. The space will be taken over by someone who runs a chain of bars that have been compared to “Euro Disney’s vision of the classic Irish watering hole."
On it goes.
I rarely went in to Grassroots. Just a few times over the years. It wasn't my bar. But I went in before the closing, as I often do, and wish I'd gone more often.
It's a weekday afternoon between Christmas and New Year's and the place is quiet. A couple of customers sit at the far end of the long bar. No one is playing darts or looking at the silent television. The music is classic rock. "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Don't Stop Believin." The bartender is a woman with tattoos on her arm and a vivid, multicolored black eye. I take a seat at one of the tattered stools, order a drink, and come into bracing contact with the smell of the place.
The feral stink of any old dive is the same from bar to bar, years of sour beer soaked into the floor boards, the organic rot of old wood. It tells you that you're in a place that's been here for a long time. But Grassroots has something extra, a musky base note that shifts in the air, lifting and then fading. At first I can't place it. Then my association goes to the one time I inhaled the residue of a dead body,
in the hallway of the Elk Hotel on West 42nd Street. The pungent odor of profound decay. And since I seem to be drawn to the odor of decay (old books, dead leaves), I keep trying to catch it, but the longer I sit here, the more I lose it. (Later, at home, I will find it again, clinging to my sweater.)
Flies buzz the air of Grassroots. Fruit flies and house flies that land without hesitation on the book I am holding (Heidi Julavits'
The Folded Clock), rubbing their hands together to groom themselves. I wave them away and drink my drink.
Two older men sit at the near end of the bar, by the window where daylight is dying. They talk about "all the perverts in Hollywood," the creeps getting ripped from the woodwork. A young man takes a seat and opens a paperback copy of
Semiotics of the Cinema. As the sunlight fades, the bar blushes red with neon from the GRASSROOTS sign in the window tangled in houseplants.
A woman walks up and down, taking pictures of the place. When I ask her about the pictures, she introduces herself and it turns out we know each other virtually, blog to blog. Her name is C.O. Moed of
My Private Coney, aka It Was Her New York, where she has shared her
memories of the Grassroots. I
interviewed her back in 2009.
So we sit and talk. I ask her, "Do you smell that incredible odor? Like a dead body?" She replies, "It's a million rats rotting in the walls." Her definitive answer settles it for me and now I can forget about the smell and move on to other things.
C.O. has been coming to Grassroots since she was a teenager in 1976. Her mother brought her. Her mother was a bohemian pianist, "eccentric as hell and wild." C.O. says, "I like to think of New York as a mother. The streets are your mother and your mother is your mother. And you have to survive both." So she turned to Grassroots for survival. It's home.
"I was here the night after Trump was elected. I was here the night before my mother died and the night after my mother died. I was sitting at that table, right there by the window, when I saw the first suit walk down St. Mark's and I thought Oh shit. That was 1978."
C.O. grew up on Grand Street and never felt like she belonged anywhere or to anyone. "Grassroots was a place I could go and sit down and be safe. No demands here. You could come in and people liked you. It was a place I kept returning to. I fit here. It's declasse--in the literal meaning of the word--there's no class here. Whatever you are, you're here. It had a big gay following. Vietnam Vets. Actors. NYU students. Black people. Whatever you were, you got to be a part of it."
She calls Grassroots a "touchstone" in her life. "I germinated here," she says. Like many New Yorkers who've been here awhile, and like many newcomers who come looking for New York, she laments the passing of the city's soul, the vanishing of places that feel authentic and open.
"I don't have any place in my life like this," she says. "When you want to leave your apartment, where do you go? I don't know anymore. But who the fuck am I not to have diaspora? You love what you love. Go forward."
I ask her what she means by diaspora. She means loss.
"You lose your homeland," she says. "You lose your mother tongue. You lose your friends. Who the fuck are we to be excused from loss? And yes, it feels awful. Do you miss your home? Does a fish miss the water? I don't know any place like this."
As the afternoon darkens, more people enter. Younger and older. An older man at the bar says to his friend, "The
Times had an interesting article about how more and more stores won't take cash." They talk about this and then it's back to the perverts in Hollywood and how young men, especially, don't know how to talk to women because they spend all their time on smartphones. The friend says, "They need to watch a few Cary Grant pictures."
A trio of hefty young men in flannel shirts walk in and order pitchers of beer and bowls of popcorn. A young woman comes in wearing a brown beret, combat boots, and smart glasses, an unwashed
New Yorker tote bag on her shoulder. I think: My people.
"There are kids who get this place," C.O. says. "They're the well-read outliers in this world. This place is their clothing. You know when someone puts on something that looks like they should be wearing it? They're smart, bookworm, rare, unique beings. Look around. This place is inter-generational. It serves your heart and your soul.
This is not a bar for an idealized self. This is for when you have nothing left but your heart and your soul. It's no bullshit."
She turns to the young man reading
Semiotics of the Cinema and asks him why he comes to Grassroots. He explains that he's always come here, since college, that it was just the right place for him to be.
Though a few suits were walking down St. Mark's Place 40 years ago, the street continued to be a counter-cultural zone for decades. Until now. Today, when she looks at St. Mark's, C.O. thinks, "We're fucked."
"Neighborhood people, who are not one-percenters, people who need to go someplace safe with their heart and soul, have nowhere to go. Look. You go to a place and there are micro-layers a foot long between you and everyone else, distance between your bone and their perception of you. Race, class, gender, all that. Here there is no distance. Here you don't have to defend, validate. At Grassroots, it's like being alone, only you've got company."
We talk about the new bar that is going to replace Grassroots, the one that's been compared to "Euro Disney’s vision of the classic Irish watering hole." Will it be welcoming to the same clientele?
"If it's not," says C.O., "
St. Mark's is -- well, maybe it's not dead, but it's deadened. Maybe it's been Botoxed. I feel erased. There's no place that fits me now. So I'm solitary. Yeah, I can be myself without Grassroots. You can be yourself without your mother and father. But a part of you is gone. People want to say New York is always changing? This is not change. This is obliteration."
At night, the bar fills up, mostly with young people. Girls in chunky eyeglasses and more berets. Boys in flannel shirts and tattoos. A few punks with half-shaven heads. The odor shifts again as the bar warms from all the body heat. Now it smells of winter coats wreathed in cigarette smoke, and hot cider from the hot cider pot, and popcorn from the popcorn machine. Someone is fragrant with pipe tobacco. Grassroots smells very much alive.
An older man dressed head to toe in Army camouflage orders a pitcher of beer and one mug. He leans over and asks one of the bartenders, "This place is closing?"
The bartender says, "It's got a new owner. I don't know what's gonna happen. They seem like nice guys, so maybe they won't change it much. Put a kitchen in the back. A few upgrades. It'll be pretty much the same."
I think: We'll see about that. Too many times, I've seen what the new people do--those "nice guys"--how they say they'll preserve a place and then they gut it, raise the prices, change the clientele. So we'll see. Whatever happens, you can bet the place won't smell the same.
