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Chumley’s owner Steve Shlopak recently poured his heart out to The Observer, admitting that the former speakeasy is now “just a dirt hole” with only two walls still up! The 1831 West Village landmark was closed in April when a chimney collapsed during repairs on an interior wall. Shlopak went into further disheartening detail:
The rest of the building is held up with construction scaffolding. There is no ceiling and there is no floor... It’s almost as if you’re watching an old World War II film. You know how soldiers would gather in the corner of a bombed-out farmhouse where just two walls are still up? That’s what we’ve got here.It was previously believed that Chumley’s would reopen last month, but difficulties with the building’s landlord – Margaret Streicker Porres, one of New York’s 10 worst landlords of ’06 according to The Village Voice – have perpetually delayed renovations, among other problems. Meanwhile the old furnishings, such as photographs and framed book sleeves of authors like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who were known to frequent Chumley's, have been mothballed.
Shlopak says that if the Buildings Department deems the 19th century building stable enough, work might begin next month. Then maybe Chumley’s could reopen sometime in the spring of 2008, in time for the one-year anniversary of the chimney collapse! He's also trying to gather a group of investors to help him buy the building, which is on the market for $3.75 million. In the meantime, we think Shlopak ought to get together with the long-frustrated owners of Radegast Hall for some beer and sympathy.
Photo of Chumley's interior pre-closing by Chris Hall.
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I do miss Chumleys....
here's to hoping that when they do reopen it retains its original character, and doesn't get spoiled by a cheap, modern edifice as they've been doing in the LES.
I live in D.C. and really hope that Chumleys will make it through.....please NYC'ers do what you can to save this gem.
If Shlopak Didnt scew it up, he would still have a cool place in the Village with the Blue Mill.....and who was that long haired freak who was always sitting in that place??
At 3.75 mil it seems like a decent buy. Tear it down and put a twelve story boutique hotel on the site with a bar called Chumley's on the ground floor. Throw some framed covers from cheap paperback trash novels on the wall and say that Washington Irving and Walt Whitman did an act of sodomy in the men's room early in the 1850's.
It's about as real as it gets with these historic bars in New York. It follows in the footsteps of Frank's Tavern down there in the Wall Street area.
I've watched every one of my beloved after dark haunts closed in the last several years (Baktun, Filter 14, Centro Fly, The Lunatarium (well for the most part) and Vinyl..oh especially my beloved Vinyl, oh how I miss thee..) so I'm resigned to the fact that this crap just happens here.
"No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet café plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now."