Manitoba's Closes After 2 Decades In East Village

EAST VILLAGE, NY — Manitoba's, the East Village dive bar owned by a longtime punk rocker, has closed after two decades in the neighborhood. The watering hole's owner, "Handsome" Dick Manitoba, announced its closure in an Instagram post late last week.

"(I)n spite of the fact that we’ve closed we know that people from all over the world and all over America for 20 years have excitedly entered our doors Loving a bar if there is such a thing as loving a bar," Manitoba wrote Thursday. "This wasn’t 'bar' to them, It was a special unpretentious relaxed home away from home."

Manitoba, the Bronx-born musician who sang with the punk band The Dictators, opened the bar at 99 Avenue B in 1999. Its walls were adorned with photos and posters of punk icons such as The Ramones and the famed club CBGB.

Manitoba's post did not explain why his bar had to shutter. He did not respond to Facebook messages seeking more information, but he told EV Grieve that it may have been his business partner's decision.

"So my guess — this is not a fact — is (the partner) said just close it down," he told the website. "It’s an educated guess because nobody else had the right to say that unless it was people we owed money to."

The day before he announced the bar's closure, Manitoba said in another Instagram post that he had heard there was no money to open it that day.

The bar had been through trouble before it was forced to close. Manitoba raised more than $32,000 through a crowdfunding campaign in 2015, saying the spot's future was threatened after it had to settle an Americans with Disabilities Act lawsuit.

Patrons mourned the shutting of one of the few remaining punk bars in a neighborhood that was once a center of the subculture.

"However your memory sways, I give respect to a scene now total(ly) gone from a once glorious block," Zoe Hansen, who managed and worked at Manitoba's, wrote on Facebook.