Last call for iconic Midtown NYC bar Neary’s

Neary’s, the wonderful pub that Jimmy Neary opened at 348 E. 57th St. in 1967, closed its doors on Friday for the last time. No wonder it has been called the end of an era. But while I’m sad to miss Neary’s Irish coffee and lamb chops, I couldn’t care less about the era.

An “era” of one kind or another comes to an end every day in New York City, but the sooner we give up the clamor for an irrevocably, inaccurately remembered past, the better off we’ll be eight million of us.

Eras supposedly ended when the Brooklyn Dodgers moved to Los Angeles; when electronics stores gave way to the World Trade Center; when Studio 54 closed; when the Cross-Bronx Expressway destroyed the southern half of the borough; when music stores disappeared from West 48th Street; and when Lord & Taylor gave its soul to WeWork.

Now, mourning long-gone emotional points is entirely appropriate as a matter of the heart. Sentimental slob that I am, I miss Nedick every time I pass the corner of Broadway and West 34th Street.

What isn’t appropriate is to seize upon any casual loss in the service of a broader, falsified nostalgia: Namely, the notion that the city was once more human, more alive, and more civilized than it is today.

Oh, for the days of street basketball and a Greenwich Village that was truly bohemian! Or the downtown club of the underworld of the 1970s and 1980s!

An essay by Roger Friedman on his Showbiz 411 site may represent an entire sociocultural perspective: “Time is marching on New York,” Friedman wrote of Neary’s closing. “All the great places are gone, or on the verge of closing. The peak of authenticity is almost over.”

He’s not wrong that many beloved buildings and businesses are gone. But one person’s “authenticity” is another’s tired old business that ran out of steam, as most any business eventually does.

To sentimentalize New York’s past is to whitewash the present past, which was not as wholesome or clean as the late writer Pete Hamill would have us believe—not even in his beloved, 20th-century Brooklyn. Irish and Italian. and second generation Jewish fighters.

The actual Gotham of the 1930s, for example, was not the white-tie, white-tail fantasy depicted in the movies set 3,000 miles away in California. The disconnect was not only economic.

A few blocks from my childhood home in Brooklyn, my grandfather recalled with shame, my fellow paisanos taunted their few black neighbors with cheers about Mussolini’s mechanized conquest of Ethiopia’s savage army.

In 1967, when Jimmy Neary poured his first pint, the city was entering a doom loop that was very real, unlike the one imagined today. The middle class was fleeing, race riots gave us a “long hot summer,” and Times Square’s descent into depraved anarchy was underway for those willing to recognize it.

They all claim to miss the opulence of the 1960s with its charming Neary-like watering holes and jazz clubs where the musicians were mostly black. But New York City was far more isolated than it is now—and not just in Sutton Place, the default enclave from which Neary’s drew much of its clientele.

A popular Pinterest page called “35 Incredible Color Photographs Captured of Everyday Life in New York City in the 1960s” is incredible in a way the title didn’t suggest. I found exactly one black face in the images of full Fifth Avenue, the Grand Central area, and Times Square.

I will miss Neary’s as much as anyone. I appreciated the Irish comfort that emanated from Jimmy and the dashes on the walls of Hugh Carey, Bill Clinton and other powers that actually went there more than once.

It was a mecca for patrons who enjoyed dressing up for hamburgers and fish and chips. I never went there without wearing a suit or at least a navy blazer.

It was the site 44 years ago of my first meeting with the woman who is now my wife. When the newspaper unions went on strike in 1978, I went to Neary’s at 10pm to drink alone in a red leather booth in the corner – which was still there last week – before my midnight-to-dawn shift .

I also miss the old neighborhood of Neary, where I lived for 13 years and watched Greta Garbo stroll down the sidewalk from her apartment on East 52nd Street.

But historians, bloggers, and all those who decry the current supposedly miserable state of New York need to get a life.

Long live the Neary’s! However, wallowing in false memories will do nothing to confront today’s challenges of rampant street disorder, homelessness and government dysfunction.

To prevail, we must leave the past behind – and believe that the best is yet to come.