Kelly's Pub Is Closed

An ode to a bar that might never have existed in the first place

It wasn’t a special place, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t special to me.

An unremarkable bar on an unremarkable stretch of street in perhaps the most unremarkable of New York City’s endless collection of neighborhoods, it was not a place that had anything in particular to recommend it by other than the fact that it served cold beer and played music and sat a block’s walk from two of my friends’ apartments during the first long, languid summer that I lived in the city.

Well, I didn’t actually live in the city.

I was between my final two years of college, slogging through a miserable internship in the commuter suburbs, working for a pompous blowhard of an architect whose self-image far exceeded his abilities, living in his ratty guest house and loathing the professorial air he tried and failed to command. I hated every minute of the job—judging by the performance review I received at the end of the summer, the feeling was mutual—and so I took every opportunity I could to board a train down to the city, where my friends had landed similarly dead-end but better-located jobs of their own, so I could spend every last minute until Monday hanging out in the bar with them.

I was a coattail regular.

Where I spent virtually every Friday and Saturday night inside the bar, my friends were clocking four to five additional nights a week there, and I had the luxury of riding in the wake of their familiarity. In the ten seconds between crossing the threshold of the bar and alighting on a stool, beers—draft Miller Lite, they didn’t serve much fancier—would have already been poured for us. We would drink like fish, play endless rounds of foosball, banter and laugh and yell, have fierce pre-smartphone-era arguments about pointless facts that we never remembered to settle by the time we got back in front of a computer, order pizza—chicken and onion, every time—from a place five blocks away owned by the same people, and at the end of the night our tab never fully accounted for how much we’d have consumed.

Kelly’s had a jukebox—a real one with a fixed collection of albums, not the regrettably omnipresent internet-connected TouchTunes machines that cede total control of an establishment’s vibe to any drunken fool with a wad of bills—and one of the other regulars managed to play the same song some time after midnight seemingly every night. The opening strums to “New York City Serenade”, a meandering, moseying, disjointed ballad from Bruce Springsteen’s 1973 album The Wild, The Innocent and the E Street Shuffle that clocks in at nearly ten minutes long, would leak out of the sound system, and we’d know Eddie was at it again.

It’s a bold move to play a song so long and so down-tempo at a bar, but no one seemed to mind; in fact, it came to feel like the evening was incomplete without it.

Billy, he's down by the railroad tracks
Sittin' low in the back seat of his Cadillac…

I found myself thinking about Kelly’s for the first time in a long time just the other day, when my friend Michele posted a solicitation on Twitter for one’s favorite Bruce Springsteen song. Almost immediately, this song popped in to my mind, and just as quickly, it dislodged the long-dormant memory of the bar from a back corner somewhere.

It had long ago closed, and I knew that already—the entire block of walk-up buildings it sat amidst had been razed to build a shiny glass condo tower with a luxury gym at its base, a typical early-21st-century New York City story in the heady days of development just before the last financial crisis—but I figured I’d still be able to look it up.

I couldn’t find anything.

After a half-hour of poking around on Google Maps and fiddling with search terms but coming up empty, I emailed one of the friends I frequented it with to confirm the location was actually where I’d remembered it, as I might’ve been off by a few blocks or an avenue. Granted, I was searching for a long-closed bar with perhaps the most common possible name for a bar to have, but I expected at least some ephemera to remain from its existence; a picture, a review, an address—any external confirmation of my fuzzy memories.

Nothing.

The internet is forever, our parents and teachers had once breathlessly warned us, but as the internet reaches middle age, it seems its memory is actually shockingly short. Websites are updated or subsumed or shuttered entirely, broken links rot into a graveyard of 404 errors, and the eternal digital present quickly dissolves into the forgotten past. My time at Kelly’s was just before the dawn of the smartphone era, and as a consequence, I don’t have any photos of it.

Seemingly no one else does, either.

I began to wonder—mostly in jest, but not entirely—if I’d imagined the whole thing. Maybe I wasn’t remembering the bar correctly. Maybe the foosball table had been at one of the other places we’d occasionally end up. Maybe it wasn’t Eddie who always played Springsteen on the jukebox—maybe it had been me all along. Maybe Kelly’s never existed, because to picture the people in it—the person I was and the people my friends were at the time—is to imagine a laughably implausible vision of the world.

That group of fuck-up friends, broke as hell and living in sublet rooms in fifth-floor walkups or crashing on the threadbare sofas of those who did, staying out until dawn broke because 4am last call doesn’t apply when you’ve befriended the bar staff, taking the first morning train back to the suburbs and showing up to work without so much as a nap in between? They don’t exist either. They’re senior staff now, the people rolling their eyes when the interns show up clutching a Gatorade in the morning. They’re parents and homeowners, living in suburbs all their own, people who fall asleep on the couch after one beer on a Friday night because they had a long week.

That’s not bad, mind you.

We’re all more comfortable now, and not in the pejorative sense. We have our lives mostly together now, and things to do that don’t involve spending every evening in the same nondescript bar. We have somewheres and someones to go home to, and no reason to stay out until dawn waiting for something to happen—something that rarely did.

So maybe it’s for the best that I can’t confirm the memories.

If I could, maybe I’d see just how shabby the bar was, just how basic and boring we must have been for making it our home away from home. Maybe I’d see in our faces how lonely and frustrating and unmoored those supposedly-freer years of earlier adulthood can be. Maybe it wouldn’t feel like such an important time in our lives. Maybe I’d see just how bad my taste in shirts was at the time.

Maybe I’d want to forget it all.

Unbound by any conflicting records, though, the fuzzy memories of those nights are allowed space to grow in my mind. They’re allowed to do what they want, allowed to ramble and shift and soften and reshape themselves into something worthy of the song that reminded me of them in the first place.

It's midnight in Manhattan, this is no time to get cute
It's a mad dog's promenade
So walk tall, or baby, don't walk at all

Kelly’s Pub is closed, if it ever existed at all.

There’s still a seat waiting for me whenever I want to go back.

—Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

I bet you’ve got some place like this from your past, too—not necessarily a bar, but any place that holds outsized purchase in your memory. Why don’t you tell us about it?