Freddy's Bar, Down the Memory Hole
An article in BK MAG, owned by arena operator Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment, can't tell readers that the bar was ejected to build the Barclays Center. Much more to remember.
Two days ago, BK MAG (before its sale, Brooklyn Magazine) published an enjoyable and mostly thoughtful article—but with a glaring gap—about a unique Brooklyn bar: 35,000 Nights at Freddy’s.
Freddy’s Bar, when located at Sixth Avenue and Dean Street and known as Freddy’s Bar & Backroom, was the clubhouse of the Atlantic Yards opposition, circa 2004-2010, before moving to what some call the South South Slope, at Fifth Avenue and 17th Street.1
The article begins by citing a heavy link chain around the bar, known as “the Chain of Justice”:
Like the weathered, gorgeous old bar, that chain made the trek from Freddy’s Bar and Backroom, the first iteration of the business located at the intersection of 6th Avenue and Dean Street…. The chain was installed after the establishment lost its seven-year appeal to stay on its ancestral ground on the border of Park Slope and Prospect Heights in 2010. As a symbolic protest following the final appeal, patrons and staff handcuffed themselves to the chain for several hours to stave off the wrecking ball, downing beers and cherishing their final few hours in the bar that was their home for the news cameras, and for themselves.
(Emphasis added)
Um, they didn’t handcuff themselves to the bar in the end, but the installation was a media event in December 2009.
What’s missing?
Hmm… what “seven-year appeal” or, rather, legal battle?
What happened when, as BK MAG puts it, “the old location was demolished and the eminent domain money came in”?
What was behind the “forced ejection” of Freddy’s?
Well, something that BK MAG seems unable to convey: it was condemned, under the state’s dubious use of eminent domain2, so developer Bruce Ratner could build the Barclays Center, the arena whose current operator also publishes the magazine, and build other components of the Atlantic Yards project.
Though BK MAG doesn’t disclose that connection, nor for that matter, any editors, Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment—owned mainly by Joe and Clara Wu Tsai, plus the Koch family—says BK MAG is among the “exciting scope of brands” it owns.
Usually, the phenomenon I call “Atlantic Yards Down the Memory Hole” is triggered by forgetfulness or carelessness. In this case, it looks more like editorial caution.
The article was credited to a writer who uses the creative moniker of Abe Beame, New York City’s Mayor during the 1970s fiscal crisis. (Pseudonymous writers, unless they’re in mortal danger, sacrifice some credibility.)
Recalling the end
Freddy’s had two closing nights, one for the public and one for regulars. The photos below are by the estimable Tracy Collins.
On the last night, a frenzied bacchanal, 26 musical acts played short sets, the crowd bobbing fiercely inches away. “We all live/at Sixth Avenue and Dean,” they sang, in sozzled solidarity, to the tune of the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.”
One regular distributed an image of Ratner on postcard-sized stickers, adapting artist Shepard Fairey’s “Obey” campaign.
The next day, as the Freddy’s crew began moving, they left messages, posters produced by Atlantic Yards opponents Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, in the front window: “We are not blighted” and “No excuse for eminent domain abuse.”
Mellowing out
“It came out great in the end. Everyone, including Bruce Ratner, got what they wanted in this deal,” Freddy’s manager (and video artist) Donald O’Finn told an interviewer in February 2011. “The owner of Freddy's got a bunch of cash and got to walk away after never really doing anything, Ratner got his stupid goddamn arena and address, and we got a fresh start.”
After all, Freddy’s reopened before the Barclays Center debuted in September 2012.
Today, as “Beame” reports, O’Finn sounds even more mellow, suggesting that the move from gentrifying Park Slope meant “we moved into a spot that I think is still very Brooklyn.”
Good point.
That raises a question: if Freddy’s is a rare institution “that retains the energy and values this borough once held, if only for a little longer,” as “Beame” writes, what were some of those values? Well, read on.
Trying to remake Brooklyn
Some with long memories may remember a “Ratnerville Singout” held nearly 19 years ago at Freddy’s.
One darkly funny song predicted, “Freddy’s Is an Escalator Now.” Today, the Freddy’s parcel is part of the B3 tower, 38 Sixth Avenue, and likely within the perimeter of the Heart of Chelsea Veterinary Group location.
The song I remember most, memorialized on video, is John Pinamonti’s “The Burrow,” below. (Here’s the studio version.)
“It makes me mad, yeah, it's such a pity / They're trying to rename Brooklyn "Forest City,” sang Pinamonti about the then-powerful developer.
Today, as Brooklyn Sports & Entertainment (BKSE) pursues a “ecosystem” of events, media, and (future) retail/hotel in Brooklyn, the lyric might be rewritten to say, “They’re trying to rename Brooklyn BKSE.” It still rhymes.
The “Freddy’s” documentary
In June 2010, Freddy’s, a documentary by Vicente Rodriguez Ortega, was shown at the Brooklyn Film Festival. As I wrote, the film hit deeper than the whimsical trailer below, with engaging talking heads, music, and some intriguing filmic composition.
The first showing was a bit like a wake, a chance for some regulars and staff to remember a unique product of a particular time and place, Prospect Heights preceding and riding a wave of gentrification.
In the film, video producer Steve deSeve says, “I view this as a battle between Donald O’Finn and Bruce Ratner. A guy who’s so pure... I see you, I take you, I make you into art... versus, like Bruce Ratner, I see you, I take you, I make you into money in my pocket.”
Stick around til the end of the trailer, when one regular observes, “It’s a precious cultural meeting place--and there’s alcohol.”
The trailer’s soundtrack is Bumbling Along, by Steve Espinola, a bridge between the artsy bohemianism of Freddy’s and the development project that forced it to move.
Near the song’s end, the music pauses, and Espinola shpritzes: “The ones who are trying to destroy my multicultural neighborhood so they could build a basketball stadium and skyscrapers. They are efficient, they are organized and sometimes murderously effective, but they are ethically short-circuited and spiritually adrift.”
Then the whimsical music returns, with the segue, “But they don’t know what’s going on, even they are bumbling along.”
Bumbling along
Sixteen years later, that line hits differently. In many ways, Forest City was bumbling along. They built the arena, but had to give up the Nets and ultimately the arena to Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov.
Forest City launched an ill-fated plan for modular construction and cut its losses, selling the project, in stages, to Greenland USA.
Greenland bumbled too, unable to start construction over the railyard or to deliver the promised affordable housing.
Now, new developers Cirrus Workforce Housing and LCOR have taken over, and expect direct subsidies and concessions from the state.
Prokhorov cashed out, selling the Nets and the arena company to Joe Tsai. The Tsais cashed out in part by selling 15% to the Koch family.
The value of that “goddam arena” has increased exponentially, but government agencies haven’t figured out how to ensure a share for the public. (Psst: Charge the arena operator for the “temporary” plaza they want to make permanent.) That’s worth a song, too.
Remembering Lee Houston
O’Finn, asked in 2011 what he missed most about the old Freddy’s, said it was too new to grasp: “The only thing I can say that I miss is Lee Houston, who was a regular who passed away. We have his picture here on the wall, but he’ll never walk in the door again, I don’t think.”
The film contains an affectionate and respectful — yet hardly worshipful — remembrance of Houston, an older Black man from a different Prospect Heights, a jazz musician, teacher, and "phenomenal ball-buster."
"Along with any number of people, I miss him tremendously," former Freddy’s bartender David Sheets told the camera in his flinty way. "Lee was Lee. He was quite someone. And I miss him very much."
After Sheets passed, I recalled those words: he, too, was “quite someone.”
Musician, graphic designer, and activist Scott Turner, in his (archived) Fans for Fair Play blog, recalled how, at Houston’s wake, O’Finn comped everyone’s drinks because he “couldn't fathom making money off of Lee's death. So he did what Bruce Ratner could never comprehend -- he lost money because it was right.”
Turner, aka RebelMart, left town before Freddy’s closed, but saluted it, and Houston, in his final Brooklyn performance, below.
"We buried Lee with tears and smiles,” Turner sang at 2:10. “We only got each other for a while."
"If Freddy's goes down, Brooklyn is gone," he warned. Well, maybe a certain version of Brooklyn, at a particular time and place.
Freddy’s today has a new home. What we’ve lost, at minimum, are memories of what it was and why it moved.
Technically, the location just below the Prospect Expressway is the beginning of Sunset Park or, as some in the real-estate world call it, "Greenwood Heights.” But it’s conceptually an extension of the South Slope.
Note: the article states that Freddy’s “is located on a sleepy commercial strip of 5th Avenue just above the Prospect Expressway and just below Greenwood Cemetery.”
Actually, it’s the opposite: just below the expressway and above Green-Wood Cemetery. C’mon, BK MAG!
As the map below suggests, the Freddy’s building, at the northwest corner of Sixth Avenue and Dean Street, was not itself blighted.
But it was within an area that included properties “exhibiting one or more blight characteristics.” At the Court of Appeals oral argument, the lawyer for the state could say that “the record also establishes that the project site as a whole is blighted.”
The question of blight in that area , at the time, was really inseparable from the question of when will the area be rezoned from industrial to allow the organic residential growth pressing from all sides.