angel's share and other ghosts

it's just a bar; it's never just a bar

this isn’t angel’s share, but it’s a lot like what it felt like (feat. john & vicki & evan)

In January of 2011, it was snowing, and John and Vicki and I went to Angel’s Share. It wasn’t the only time I went to that bar, or the only time I had a good time there— I almost always had a good time there— but it’s the one I talk about the most. We went to Angel’s Share and when we left, many hours later, the little triangle of colliding streets outside was covered in snow. It piled up against fire hydrants and parking signs and benches, flushing out noise and turning the landscape into a black-and-white movie.

John and Vicki were sitting at the bar when I showed up that night. I was wearing the same stupid skirt and the same stupid heels I always wore. I was good at nothing then, except these long-armed gestural parts of friendship, lavishing people with compliments and pulling them into corners to whisper together. I went out almost every night, always expecting that something would happen, always hoping that this was when the parade would finally come through town. All I wanted was to get inside the version of life I had heard about, the one other people, people who were better at it, were living. That longing for the better, warmer room glimpsed through somebody else’s window two stories up from the street was why I spent so much time at Angel’s Share: It was a bar that felt like getting inside of that room.

Angel’s Share (which opened in 1993 and closed at the end of last month) was a speakeasy, although its popularity predated that trend, which may have been why it never felt try-hard or cringe-y in the way so many of those other bars always did. Nothing has technically been a speakeasy since the early 1930s, but Angel’s Share was part of the faux-speakeasy craze in the aughts, which is to say it was behind an unmarked door, hidden inside of a different venue, and boasted meticulously prepared cocktails. The whole idea of the faux-speakeasies aggressively popular in that era was that they were secret, but almost none of them actually felt like secrets. Angel’s Share somehow did, despite the fact that it made very little effort about it. It never had a secret phone number, a code word, a guy you had to know. Everybody knew where it was, including Google Maps.

What made Angel’s Share more secret than the other places that tried harder to be secret was how it felt when you got inside. It was a place that slowed your blood pressure, that made your outside worries dim down and fade away. The light sat low and creamy and amber like the dusty and un-renovated part of a big museum. Even when the place was full and everybody was talking to each other in a sea of first and second dates, sound in there was somehow muted. You never had to yell to be heard. A huge painting hung over the bar, tilted like an old mirror. The angels of the name cavorted in grandly baroque pinks and golds, teal skies and fluffy little clouds. 

You knew it was an actual cool place because when you were there you never worried about being cool. I didn’t belong there; I didn’t belong anywhere. Anything I did at that time was faked and unearned. But unlike every other fancy bar where I took my ratty American Apparel skirts and my beat-up heels and my nearly-overdrawn debit card hoping that this was the place that would finally make my life as big as everyone else’s, I never felt like I wasn’t welcome. I never sat in that room and thought that I was going to be found out. Going to Angel’s Share, despite how beautiful the room was, despite the artificial secrecy, despite the drinks with their complicated ingredients and show-off names, never felt like getting away with something. Instead it felt like being over at a friend’s house, when it’s warm and it gets late and you hope you might never have to go home.

In January of 2011, when snow blanketed the night into silence, John and Vicki and I ordered drinks, and then we ordered more drinks. We moved from the bar to one of the big booths in the window, where the night poured down the glass and glowed gold under the streetlights. We probably gossiped about people we knew. We probably talked about love. When we got outside, hours later, the snow was thick and unplowed on the sidewalks. I slid and stumbled in my heels and caught myself against a parking sign and John and Vicki laughed at me. We tilted our faces upward and said how beautiful it was. They got a cab to Brooklyn and I took the subway home uptown.

And that was it. For years afterwards, the three of us talked about this night. It was the beginning of what is now a long friendship, and the kick-off of a short, bright era in which all of us were always together and always aware of the minutiae and petty dramas of one another’s lives, ricocheting from one apartment to another, and showing up to parties because we knew the others would be there. But all of this was the results, what followed from that night rather than the night itself. None of that happened at Angel’s Share.

Yet that bar is what we still talk about when we talk about how we all became friends. Nothing happened that night, not really. But that was the thing about Angel’s Share: It was a place that made you feel important. Just being there felt like you had done whatever you were trying to do by going inside this room. Nothing happened that night, and for ten years afterwards we talked about that night when nothing happened. We tell our lives to one another through little stories like these, nights where nothing happened and not much actually mattered. What makes these things important is invisible from any outside distance, which makes it hard to explain why it feels like such a personal loss when one particular bar in one particular neighborhood closes.

Just before the pandemic took over our lives in March of 2020, Fiona and I made a lot of jokes about “Paris in the ‘20s.” She lives in Paris and the joke was that whenever she would do something boring or unglamorous she would say “Paris in the 20s!” about it. “Paris in the ‘20s,” meaning the 1920s, is a concept — fictional and corrupt and embarrassing as it may be— anchored by the names of restaurants and bars. Venues made famous create eras and their meanings in the cultural imagination. It’s embarrassing to go to Deux Magots or Cafe de Flore, but tourists still do so in throngs every year. History becomes fantasy through the myth of a place. If governments and money and wars comprise sweeping textbook narratives, bars and restaurants scaffold the stories underneath those stories, making myths out of how ordinary or almost-ordinary people lived.

At a distance, eras flatten and separate, their fonts bold and their colors bright. New York in the 1970s is an idea constructed, for certain people, out of Max’s Kansas City and CBGBs and the Mudd Club and Studio 54. These places aren’t real anymore; they are words meant to summon up a fantasy. To fixate on the idea of a bar or a restaurant— or a party, a neighborhood, a social scene— in a previous era is a rank romanticization, always inaccurate and always foolish. But these romanticizations are compelling because they scale history down to something human and accessible. Few of us will ever sit in a war room with a head of state, but most of us will go to a bar. These longing fictions light up and draw us in like the amber windows of a second-floor room on a January night.

I don’t actually know whether Angel’s Share will become one of those bars, whether its name will define whatever New York City in the aughts means now, or will mean, in the cultural imagination. But I know it already feels like that, and that in fact it felt that way even before it closed, a living museum of the best part of a dubious era.

The aughts seem too recent to be churned up into nostalgia. But I can’t pretend it isn’t happening. People younger than me have started talking about 2000s New York the way my friends and I talked about 1970s and 1980s New York in the early 2000s. Nostalgia is always first and foremost a marketing exercise, and “the aughts” is a clear and marketable brand. But this time, the available nostalgia coming into fashion is for an era I experienced firsthand. It makes me feel old, and it makes me roll my eyes. But it also makes me feel an uncomfortable longing. 

It’s true that things are different now, and it’s true that in many cases I wish that they weren’t. Too many places I loved have closed; too many people have moved away. Opportunities have passed by and walls have gone up where there was once clear open space, and I find myself grimacing at Hudson Yards when the cab passes along the West Side Highway late at night. It is a conscious effort to pull apart my feelings about Angel’s Share itself, an actually good bar, closing, and my feelings about the fact that I lived in this city when it was a different city, and now teenagers dress in that era’s clothes and say that they wish that they had lived here then.

People love to dredge up that question about which things would make you leave the city if they closed. It’s a good icebreaker, a way to know someone, where their loyalties lie and how their geographies settle. We trade our lists: restaurants, bars, coffee shops, grocery stores. We make our little declarations about how we’ll leave if this or that or this other place closes. And then the place closes and we stay. Good places closing in a city are like bad days in a life. One bad day is just a bad day; one bar that isn’t there anymore is just a bar. But you have enough bad days in a row and that becomes your life, not what happened today but what is happening to you, not how you feel tonight, but who you are. Enough good places close and the whole place becomes a different place, unfamiliar and unwelcoming. Angel’s Share was just one place, but so was every other room in this city in which I have ever felt comfortable or welcomed, and I built my map— not just of a city, but of my own life— out of them.

It’s easy, and not incorrect, to say that this is an inevitable process. Of course things change, of course cities are demolished and remade at the same time we are walking around in them. Everything changes; everything always is changing. But the fact that everything changes does not mean that nothing can be ruined. We may not be able to convince ourselves to love the stranger who shows up on our doorstep, claiming that he has always lived here. Eventually Theseus may have to admit that this isn’t his ship anymore, or if it is, that it is no longer one in which he can feel at home. I always said I would leave the city if Angel’s Share closed, if Fairway was sold, if Brazenhead wasn’t here anymore. But here I am anyway, out on the part of the map where the lines fall off, too far into the future to see my way home.

Of course there are other bars; of course many of those bars are still good. New people arrive here every day and find rooms inside of which they feel at once forgiven and transformed. But the way we love things when we are very young is not necessarily something that can be recaptured. Some things can’t be returned to; some streets only run in one direction.

Lots of the places I loved fifteen years ago still are open, still serving food and drinks, still looking much the same as they always have. But even if I could walk through the same door, and sit at the same bar, I no longer have the right life, or the right heart, for it. Any telling of history knows that things usually only last for a little while, and meaning is only ever made by context. The places that meant the most to me in my twenties stand in for my twenties: This was where I cared about certain people, and believed incorrectly in certain ideas, and wanted a certain person to text me back and another to leave me alone. It would be pointless to go back; the bar may still be there, but I’m not. I do genuinely believe that Angel’s Share was a better bar than anything that has replaced or will replace it. But I even if it had stayed open forever, I could not have repeated that one snowy night that offered me a ladder into a habitable version of the world.

Sometimes the changes in my own life make me feel culpable for the changes in the city. When a place I love closes I often think, stupidly, knowing it’s stupid, that if only I had gone back more often, it wouldn’t be closing. If only I had continued to love all the same things I once loved, in the same way, maybe nothing would have changed. I don’t drink anymore, and all my friends already know one another, and in the last two years my social life has gathered into my phone and seems set on staying there even now that bars are open again. Parties became house parties, and those sorts of long fevered confessional talks one has with newly minted friends take place in kitchens and on couches, in rooms where no one can overhear us and we can’t order fries. It’s not that there are fewer new places, although it may be true that there are fewer good ones. It’s that I have less need for them, which is at once a relief and a loss. One day, places currently in their heyday will also close, and other people will mourn them, but I won’t join in. I’ll be a wave behind, already at whatever comes after loss, too far from the shore to see the land. 

Sitting in the booth by the window with John and Vicki that night, I had a sense of trying to hold onto the instance in which I was living, grasping for the thing I already had. Sometimes a really good night feels like being in a museum, that itchy, frustrated sense of not being able to do anything about it, overwhelmed with the static futility of looking. I’ve had that sort of perfect night in other places, but I had a lot of them at Angel’s Share. The whole point of a good bar is that it’s vastly more than the sum of its parts; some bars have a version of that ineffable human thing, charisma, the reason that two people can look basically the same and yet one of them will be wildly more attractive and compelling than the other. Angel’s Share had charisma like an old movie star, like the kind of person you gravitate toward in a crowded room whether they’re a best friend or a stranger. It welcomed everyone, and made you feel special for being welcomed. It had no secrets, and it made you feel like you knew all of them. 

One night eleven years ago, two new friends and I went to a bar and then we stumbled outside into the snow and went home, and now that bar isn’t there anymore. We meant to go back before it closed but we never did. I always mean to, and I never do. Somebody else, someone who wasn’t there, will tell the story of this era, and maybe they’ll say the name of this bar, and say that they wish they could have gone there. They’ll be right; they would have loved it. Everyone would have. And for a while, everyone did.

this is griefbacon’s weekly (mostly, usually) public essay. we took a little break but now we’re back. welcome, if you’re new. welcome back, if you’re not. if you enjoyed this, maybe consider subscribing, or sharing this post, or recommending it to a friend.