Mars Bar closed and all you can get is this lousy t-shirt.
It’s been a year (plus a couple of days) since the dive was shuttered, and the former regular who designed the “Marz Bar” shirts is selling the very last of them. “This building has been marked and stocked as a fallout shelter,” the t-shirt reads.
“I thought I had sold out of them last year but this one turned up in a box of records for some reason,” writes the designer (who goes by the name of Ecto-Glow) in an eBay listing, adding that he won’t be reprinting the shirt. The size-small is going for $25 and at the time of posting, a little over 4 and a half hours were left on the auction.
In an earlier blog post, the shirt’s designer, who says he grew up on Lafayette Street, explained that he first designed a “DEFEND MARZ BAR” shirt because “everyone wanted a shirt, including me. I asked someone to ask Hank [Penza, the owner] for me and he was cool with it so the first lot came out and sold out fast.” The fallout shelter shirts followed, and a little under 300 shirts were sold in the end.
“I’ve been to tons of Bars in NYC,” wrote Ecto-Glow, “but the only place I’ve been to at least triple digits was Mars (stoops and 40s don’t count) and I could probably fill a book with stories about the place (as I’m sure most could).”
If you’re not a size small or the auction’s over, don’t worry: Sergey Aniskov’s drunken Santa shirts are also still available for purchase.
