After The Mars Bar, Then What?
Update: Mars Bars bas been demolished. The space is now a TD Bank.
I’ve been to Mars Bar, but it was a long time ago. The place smells funky. The beer comes in bottles. The bathrooms have an especially bad reputation. Years upon years of hard-won grime coats the carved, hacked-upon bar. The regulars include some seedy types you don’t see downtown much these days. They provide a sort of deranged entertainment, like a living Tom Waits tune. After sitting for a while on the exposed sponge innards of a ripped-up bar stool, I’d feel a compelling need to move along, possibly home to take a shower.
Still, when I walk by, I’m glad it’s still there, hanging on while glossy new condos and hotels rise around it. As Jeremiah Moss from Vanishing New York put it: “It was as if that crumbling little corner was giving the finger to all the shiny towers rising around it, and all the shiny people swarming in.” So when it was announced that it would be demolished to make way for a 12-story apartment building, I wasn’t surprised. Even so. CBGB’s heyday was long gone when it closed. Mars Bar was anti-heyday, but it is still the definitive crusty dive bar in a changing neighborhood.
The new apartment building, as reported by BoweryBoogie, will cover the entire block of Second Avenue between First Street and Second Street, and contain sixty units. 12 are intended for affordable housing and 9 will be reserved for families already living in the existing building. The rest will be market rate—in other words, more high-priced rentals in the hood.
I enjoy much of the spoils of East Village gentrification and I know that change is a constant in New York. But so many of the changes are ugly, expensive, cookie-cutter buildings that replace something storied and unique, and displace the people who made it that way.
There’s a possibility that Mars Bar will reopen in a larger space once the building is complete, two years from now. But I will miss that improbable little eyesore, clinging on to the edge of the block.
Mars Bar
25 E. 1st St. at Second Ave.
12pm-4am