Scott Valentine had never seen a crowd so big at Neir’s Tavern.
The corner bar in Woodhaven, Queens was packed this Saturday as hundreds of New Yorkers dropped in to help celebrate the news that came in the evening before: the bar would not be closing, after all.
The establishment had to switch to plastic cups to handle the rush, which took Valentine by surprise. “Let me tell you, all the years I’ve been coming here with my dad, Bing, I’ve never been served in a plastic cup,” said Valentine. "Last week, it was just us here in the bar. Come back here next Saturday, you’ll see.”
For a few days last week, Neir’s went from “the most famous bar you’ve never heard of” to the bar everyone was talking about. But anomaly or not, the Valentines were happy the bar had staved off closure. On Friday, owner Loycent Gordon announced a handshake deal with the building’s landlord, Henry Shi. The deal, which included a grant from the City’s Department of Small Business Services, would keep Neir’s open for another five years, with an option to renew.
This last-minute diplomacy, and $90,000 in grant money—announced in person by Mayor Bill de Blasio on Friday—kept the taps flowing.
“The mayor did a good deed here with the bar,” said Eddie Schubert, an Ozone Park resident and longtime Neir’s patron. Schubert thought the bar would close. “If they would have closed [Sunday, as planned], I don’t know what I would have done. I had to come to reminisce,” he said.
Attached as they are to the bar and the neighborhood, rising rents have pushed out a lot of Neir’s regulars. Schubert said it was too expensive here, even to retire.
And it was almost too expensive for Neir’s. Last week Gordon said that the rent previously shot up from a little over $2,000/month to $3,100, and the new hike would have brought that up to $5,400, which would have put the bar out of business.
Geoff Klement, another regular, said it’s not unusual in the neighborhood.
“I’ve seen a person buy a property and then quadruple the rent,” said Klement. “I believe in a free market, but there has to be a cap. We are talking about a place with cultural value.”
Klement stood outside Neir’s smoking a cigar with his father Paul, a Neir’s patron of 67 years. Paul remembered the bar for its class, and he remembered Joe Neir as its iconic bartender.
“You know, he used to wear the apron, the rag, everything,” said Paul Klement. “He was no nonsense, Frank Sinatra style. And he was good. Back then, it was three deep at the bar. It was always that way.”
Neir's Tavern this weekend
It was packed three deep again this weekend in crowds Gordon said he’d never seen before, both on Friday during the announcement from de Blasio, and on Saturday during a #SaveNYC rally that was previously billed as a farewell. The latter became part-celebration and part-rally for advocates of commercial rent reform; it was organized in part by Jeremiah Moss, who runs the blog ‘Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York.’ Moss and others were happy for Neir’s, but worried for the future of small businesses in New York.
In 2018, Union Square’s famed Coffee Shop closed its doors after 28 years, eventually being taken over, in part, by a Chase bank. And last April, the infamous White Horse Tavern in the West Village narrowly avoided erasure at the hands of new landlords. The tavern was a famous dive frequented by the likes of Jack Kerouac and Dylan Thomas; while the name is the same, the prices went up.
“This is all human capital. It takes time to build up a place like [Neir’s], to build a reputation,” Olympia Kazi, an advocate from NYC Artist Coalition, told Gothamist. “We cannot allow predatory landlords to decide what happens to these businesses.”
Her group is one of many to push for the passage of commercial rent stabilization, which would offer stronger lease protections to small businesses like Neir’s. Councilmember Stephen Levin introduced such a bill in November, which would establish a Rent Guidelines Board, with the interest of protecting small businesses. De Blasio, however, declined to support that bill, saying he was sympathetic but skeptical that it could survive a legal challenge.
“The protections have to be there,” said Kazi. “The mayor is not going to come every time there is a crisis.”
Neir's Tavern this weekend
Other activists have backed the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, which would give tenants a right to lease renewals and a mechanism to arbitrate rent-hikes. After initially voicing support for the bill, City Council Speaker Johnson has recently wavered on its viability. The city's real estate lobby has said the bill would “kill ingenuity” in the real estate industry.
Kirstin Theodos, an advocate for the Small Business Jobs Survival Act, said Speaker Johnson deserves some blame for not fighting harder on the issue in 2018.
“Had [Johnson] followed his commitment, this wouldn’t have happened,” Theodos told Gothamist, gesturing to the bar around her. “That was 15 months ago, and the reality is that in five years we’ll have the same situation.”
In the short term, Gordon told Gothamist he was just worried about putting a pen to paper on the informal deal the mayor had helped broker. After that his sights are set on keeping Neir’s alive to be 200 years old, which he hopes will help the bar achieve protected landmark status.
“The question is do we have a balance of power? The answer is no. There’s a lot of people that are hurting because of long-term speculation by landlords,” said Gordon. “It seems like the laws are in the [landlords] favor, and it took the mayor coming here to help us out.”
“We don’t have that type of leverage as local businesses,” Gordon added. “What are we going to say, we’ll walk away from our business? That’s not leverage.”
Of a like mind was Susan Neir, the granddaughter of Joe Neir, the tavern’s namesake. Her family had long since sold the bar, but their pictures still covered the walls. Neir lamented the financial issues that had almost shut the place down.
“It’s the ‘Green America’,” she said. “The people with all the money step on the little people. Times have changed.”
