Siberia, one of New York City’s scummiest dive bars, has reopened — again
The late '90s dive bar inside a subway station has found a new home inside a different subway station, two decades after shutting its doors.
When F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his oft-misquoted line “I once thought there were no second acts in American lives, but there was certainly to be as second act to New York’s boom days,” it’s unlikely he had Siberia in mind. For starters, whatever the powers of Fitzgerald’s prescience, he surely didn’t know that one day a dive bar would open in a subway station. And, crucially, the legendary dive that was once located just inside the 50th Street 1 station is now actually on its third life, not its second.
Siberia is much beloved among an older set of city booze aficionados for its novel first location and its anything-goes nature whose descriptions stretched the thesaurus’s ability to find synonyms for dirty. It was “malodorous,” it was “dank,” or it was just plain “disgusting.” Patrons were known to just toss their beer bottles at the wall after finishing them, the anarchic spirit of the broken New York City of the 1970s somehow all still found in this one subway dive bar, and its second location on 40th Street and Ninth Avenue where it opened (again) in 2001.
And like any place with a good legend, the bar became a media haven for regular workaday reporters headquartered in Midtown and a list of celebrity fans who you could count on catching there, like Anthony Bourdain, Christy Turlington and Jimmy Fallon. The bar as an overall experiment lasted a little over ten years. Its first version opened in the subway in 1996 and grew its reputation for squalor through 2001, when it was evicted after a long fight with its landlord. The bar quickly moved a few blocks south, where it continued the party in a larger space but then closed again, seemingly for good, in 2007 after the landlord pulled the plug. But in an unexpected development, the bar has come back to the subway, making its third home inside a former taco spot down the stairs of the 57th Street entrance to the Columbus Circle station, in the decidedly not-divey Turnstyle Underground Market. After all, in an environment where the MTA is willing to give some retail space to a dinosaur bodega art project, why not lease another small spot to a dive bar?
The new bar might be opening in the Turnstyle Market but this is no branding play from people trying to capitalize on a beloved name, the third Siberia is the labor of the bar’s original founder Tracy Westmoreland. Some people bringing back a bar that’s been eulogized to the point of mythical status for its unruly, filthy scumminess might try to start out by making the place look like a sty to begin with, especially when that person was the man who ran the first two editions of Siberia. And while the new spot has slightly foreboding air thanks to black and red lighting, and the bar’s small size harkens back to the original location, the bar is clean at the moment. It also figures to stay cleaner than it was in its first and second incarnation because Westmoreland is more willing to play by the rules the third time around.
“The reason Siberia was in a crappy hole is because it was $1,000 a month and I could afford it,” he told The Groove during a visit last Friday. “The reason that we could have bathrooms with no doors on them back then is because I never filed with the health department. But I’ve got to stress this now: the people in the health department are great.”
The Groove
Westmoreland also doesn’t have to worry about the state of the bathrooms this time around because the new bar is so small that it doesn’t even have them. Instead, you’ve got to do your business at a pair of nearby, password-locked stalls in the Turnstyle Market.
Siberia has a lot to live up to thanks to the fact that it became such a legend of squalor and excess, a sloppy and slovenly media dirt pit. Especially as the city has sloughed off its post-industrial slump and become a place that’s not as rough around the edges as it used to be, where the anthem of the day is a song lamenting the lost paradise of scratched-up filthy places like the original Siberia.
Even if the new bar doesn’t meet the mucked-up standards of the old locations, it will at least have Westmoreland. Physically imposing but chatty with anyone who’ll walk in, Westmoreland no doubt grew the original bar’s notoriety by being a personally fun guy to party with and by going to great lengths to save the place, including chaining himself, his kids and a priest to the bar and traveling to Japan to flier outside the headquarters of Mitsubishi, the company that owned the bar’s landlord.
Always known as a friendly presence at both iterations of the bar, the intervening 18 years don’t seem to have made Westmoreland any grumpier or introverted as he’s filled the time searching for a new home for the bar, bouncing and popping up in movies. The first time I showed up at Siberia, popping in for a couple drinks before catching Wet Leg at Central Park, Westmoreland introduced himself to me in between trips in and out of the bar to get bags of ice. When he was done with that, he filled a quiet moment while he was eating a bagel by lamenting to me that he wasn’t supposed to be eating bagels anymore but hey what was wrong with eating a quarter or a half of one.
And while he might not import the grime, Westmoreland is keeping the lineage of the bar alive by retaining the only two rules that he ever laid down at previous incarnations: no cursing and men can’t hit on women. While I interviewed him, Westmoreland overheard one of the old bar’s regulars dropping a “fucking” in conversation with someone else, which earned the man a reminder about the rules. It was, come to think of it, the only cursing I’d heard in the bar on my two visits there.
You are perhaps blanching at the rules, especially in the sleaziest dive in Manhattan. Westmoreland himself said in an old interview featured in a documentary about Siberia that the rules were about trying to enforce a modicum of self-control in the bar, though regulars at the first two spots suggested in that same documentary that it was more about giving Westmoreland an easy way to 86 people he didn’t like. Either way, Westmoreland shrugged the idea that people wouldn’t like the rules, and shared a story demonstrating that even people who didn’t fully understand them still supported them.
“I said to this girl once, these are the house rules: no cursing, no hitting on women. And she looked at me, and she said, ‘You know what? That's a good rule, man, nobody should be beating their women,’” he said.
Beers (bottles of Bud, Bud Light, Corona) will run you $7 and well drinks will run you $8, and Donna the bartender was not stingy on offering buy backs. The bar has made a slight effort toward meeting the day’s tastes by stocking Athletic, but Westmoreland doesn’t have any interest in moving any closer to wellness trends.
“People who don't drink, I give them props. They're a better, stronger person than I am. But honestly, if somebody comes and you want, what do you call it, a mocktail?” He shook his head.
The bar is always going to retain the air of a dive as well, because the size of the place keeps things so no-frills. There are no taps, no televisions, and if I remember my hazy second visit, which included a trip behind the bar, there weren’t even lime slices for mixed drinks. A handful of bar stools and one large, cushioned captain’s seat, which Westmoreland said he brought from his own living room, provide the seating. There’s a very small table in one corner of the bar, a digital jukebox that always seems to have money in it and a Ms. Pac-Man machine in the other corner. Behind the bar, there are 40 oil portraits by Iranian-American artist Dana Nehdaran, who Westmoreland said he met swimming in a gym pool.
The paintings are part of a larger project Nehdaran has been working on in which he’s painting 360 portraits both of people he knows and also people he’s simply stopped on the street, a larger shared experience that fits the divey, welcoming nature of a place like Siberia.
“I had this stroke because of COVID,” Nehdaran explained at the bar. “So I stayed at home recovering for three months. I started sketching myself through the mirror, and I missed company, so I asked my friend to pose for me, and we chatted and I painted them at the same time.”
From there, Nehdaran kept going, hitting 100, then 200 oil portraits, before deciding to go for 360.
“These are regular people. But there are some very different levels of money, of race, age and gender. Most of them are New Yorkers, but some are friends who visited New York, or some are tourists from Times Square. I asked them [to come to my studio], and they came,” he said.
That Westmoreland would meet someone at his gym, befriend him and get him to lend him dozens of paintings is no surprise, it’s the same charm that’s kept Siberia going onto its now third location. Last Friday, Westmoreland stayed busy greeting new drinkers and plenty of old fans who were coming to see the new digs; when I’d finished interviewing him, Westmoreland spent time introducing me to those old timers. He also roped me into helping him find and then figure out how to turn on the bar’s smoke machine.
Everyone has a favorite dive they wish they could bring back. Hell, I could write a weepy personal list of my own dearly departed crapholes that still somehow smelled like cigarettes years after the ban on smoking in bars was firmly in place. It’s strange for me to think of what it would be like if one day I woke up and someone told me the Gotham City Lounge was back, or that they were once again serving 9 a.m. beers at Jackie’s Fifth Amendment. Part of life, after all, is looking forward and finding new experiences.
For me at least, Siberia is one of those new experiences, but for the people who mourned it atop Rosie Schaap’s list of Manhattan’s Most-Mourned Bars, all of a sudden their past has reappeared as alive as ever. As it has for Westmoreland, who couldn’t help but laugh at his new circumstances even while appreciating a third chance to make a home for wayward winos.
“Siberia, we brought the vibe, the love here, right? And I look at this place, and I feel like we have the love, but sometimes I sit here, and [my girlfriend], she saw a little tear come into my eye and she goes ‘what?’ I said, ‘I feel like we're in a mall in Paramus, New Jersey,’ ” he said laughing. “So, yeah, this is not what Siberia looked like. But we got the love.”
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