It's a Tuesday and I find myself not ready to be home, so I venture across the street to what can only be given that sacred title of my neighborhood bar. It is dark, which is a prerequisite, with a lot of secret corners to hide away and a big bartop that wraps around the space. I brought a book which I can only read by candlelight, but there is a band playing with a wonderful singer, so I often sit back and look up, surveying the tapestry of characters, some of which I have seen there before but most I have not.
I love so much about this place. I love that from my window peering down over the bed I can look out and see the pool table across the street and hear voices when it is busy, never too loud, just background noise off in the distance signaling activity and life. I enjoy its class, but in a measured non-pretentious way, which you find at these spots that are not in the middle of the popular New York neighborhoods where everyone wants to go and be seen, instead, in this case, slightly removed and off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway where you can hear trucks roaring by and you really only go if you live nearby. I love that it is open until 4am every night of the week, because this means consistency, you know you can rely on it, that it's there for you as you come home late and if you are seeking out just one more. I love how it is never that busy, but there are always people, a mix of the young and the old, and that crossing into the back room at night or sitting outside on Sunday afternoon might as well be crossing borders into different countries.
It occurs to me that The Richardson might be the coolest bar in New York. I think this because its energy signals what is cool now in the year 2025, on this day to real people that live around the corner and seek out the same things people always have with a drink in their hand. When I take an out of the way walk around Greenwich Village, as I sometimes do these days looking to tap into a slice of its bohemian past, I see a lot of places clawing onto what once was. The Stonewall Inn, Kettle of Fish, Dantes, Figaro, all these names sell themselves on a previous iteration from generations ago when Jack Kerouac roamed the streets drunk and E.E. Cummings sat in the back writing his next play, at a time struggling artists could actually afford to live and drink there. The story is common now. Someone wealthy, perhaps a fancy restauranteur, bought a once-family owned enterprise in the 2000s or 2010s, spruced it up, sometimes changed the location entirely, and kept the name. They sell themselves on the coolness that once was headquartered in The Village, only now it is all a movie set or a new house built to look like it is old.
I am fascinated by questions that attempt to mark a current version of a previous past, because it understands that the world is constantly evolving as the centerpoints of creativity, power, and culture shift with the times. Is Kendrick Lamar today's Bob Dylan, both Pulitzer Prize winning lyricists? Was Mitch McConnell the newest iteration of Lyndon Johnson, wielding unprecedented power in a fractious Senate Chamber? Is there even a Greenwich Village or Left Bank anymore, just now somewhere else, or is it instead spread out and decentralized across universities and made obsolete by the Internet? Impossible to confirm and highly subjective, of course, but thought experiments to contextualize the here and now. In the smallest of ways, such things come to mind as I sit at The Richardson looking out down Graham, thinking amongst other things of the old hobo symbol from the depression noting to a weary traveler: this is the place.
