Kelly's Pub Is Closed

An ode to a bar that might never 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 dow…