Last Call

The Empire Tavern on Manhattan Avenue in Greenpoint opened in 1947 and closed for the last time on October 30, 2025. It was a bar in the older Greenpoint mode — wood-paneled, narrow, no menu past beer and shots, framed photographs of regulars on the walls going back to the seventies. The lease finally went and the owner, who had been there twenty-eight years, decided not to fight it.

I lived four blocks from the Empire for six years and drank there maybe two dozen times. Not a regular, not a stranger. When I heard in April that they were closing in October, I asked if I could photograph the final six months. They said yes the way old bars say yes, which is by not really saying yes — they pointed at a stool and told me to sit down and shoot.

I worked the same way I worked the body-shop project a few months later: one camera, one lens, no flash, available light. The Empire was a hard room to shoot in — three pendant bulbs, one of them out for most of the summer, a back wall in deep shadow, a front window that was bright in the late afternoon and nothing after seven. I made a few hundred frames a week and threw most of them away. The keeper rate on a project like this is brutal. You sit for hours and nothing happens and then five things happen in two minutes and you have to be ready.

What I learned in six months at the Empire is that a neighborhood bar that has been in the same hands that long is not really a business — it is a piece of infrastructure. People used the Empire to receive packages, leave keys for each other, plan funerals, fight quietly, recover from divorces, watch baseball games they did not particularly care about because the alternative was sitting at home alone. None of those uses are billable. The bar closed because the rent went up faster than the small comforts could carry it.

On the final night they did not do a fancy farewell. They opened at five and they closed at four, like always. The regulars came in waves, all night. Somebody brought a sheet cake. Somebody else brought a small framed photograph of the owner from 1998 that he had never seen and that he stood looking at for a long time. The last frame in this essay is the one I made at three in the morning, after the door was already locked, when the room was finally empty except for the owner and one bartender wiping down the same patch of bar for the second time.

Filed under documentary · part of Last Call.