Saturday, October 23, 2004

Buster's Garage: Tribeca Anomaly or Yet Another Ironic Hipster Bar?

In September I posted a picture of Buster's Garage, a Tribeca bar that has more of a Rush St., Chicago than Tribeca minimalist look to it. This week, the City Section has a piece, "In the Kingdom of Hip, an Outpost of Howdy," about the bar that just doesn't fit in:

"The sign out front tells you that you are no longer in TriBeCa, at least not in any recognizable version of it. Bright yellow with blinking lights, the sign usually advertises, in bold type, a beer special. Currently, it reads: 'NASCAR Sunday Funday.' The sign is for Buster's Garage, a drinking establishment on West Broadway between Worth and Leonard Streets. Buster's is something of an oddity in the neighborhood, if not in all of New York: a two-story, suburban-style sports bar plunked down right in the middle of one of the city's coolest precincts."

The NYT fails to examine one possible reason for the sports bar's presence on that very cool stretch of West Broadway: it's there as an ironic, hipster gesture to the neighborhood, to be entered the way trucker hats were to be worn before Ashton Kutcher ruined it for everyone.

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