Sarah Darville Kirk Marcoe at the bar.“It’s going from a crappy, super dive bar to a more appealing one,” said Fred Brown yesterday as he helped turn Joe’s Bar into Josie’s.
Kirk Marcoe, a new co-owner of the longstanding bar on East Sixth Street near Avenue B said it would reopen with a slightly cleaner look and a new name in mid-July. “We all appreciate a good dive bar, but that doesn’t mean it can’t have clean restrooms,” he said.
Mr. Marcoe and Rich Corton, who together also own Mona’s and Sophie’s, said they both had a special appreciation for Joe’s. They spent much of the late 1980s and ’90s playing pool there, and still live blocks away. And Mr. Brown met a woman at the bar who’s still with him 17 years later.
Mr. Marcoe’s story about a former girlfriend wasn’t quite as romantic: “She broke up with me in this bar, right over there,” he said, pointing to a spot near the front windows. Read more…
Phillip Kalantzis CopeGood morning, East Village.
As we return from a relatively quiet weekend, we were struck by this story in The Post, which describes how some Lower East Side businesses are considering using uniformed off-duty police officers to patrol the area between Houston and Delancey Streets to help cut down on noise complaints. If the move is approved by the police, could a similar plan be in the works for the East Village?
EV Grieve has a then-and-now look at life on Avenue A using historical photographs from the New York Public Library’s photo archives. Ephemeral New York also offers a look at World War II era photos, these from Fifth Street between Avenues A and B.
DNAinfo has an obituary for Howard O’Brien, the beloved bartender over at Sophie’s on East Fifth Street.
And NYU Journalism’s own Dave Winer reports that shooting will take place on the Bowery Wednesday for the new Chris Rock film, 2 Days in New York.
