Watching ‘The Fish’ Fade to Black
By BEN DETRICK,
NY Times 12.15.10
MAX FISH, a bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, celebrated its 21st anniversary last Sunday. Balloons adorned the pastel walls, tin trays freighted with lasagna and chickpeas were unwrapped, and rock bands thundered through sets in the back lounge. But the mood was less exuberant than reflective. Days earlier, patrons learned that the storied dive bar would be shuttered at the end of January, another victim of high rent.
One patron, Kevin Long, a 26-year-old professional skateboarder known as Spanky, showed off a new tattoo on his elbow, which depicted a small broken bottle, a teardrop and the letters M and F. He and a veteran bartender there had designed it on a cocktail napkin in protest. “The top 100 times of my life have all been in this bar,” Mr. Long said.
He was not alone in his enduring allegiance. Several regulars had identical ink, and a woman even left the bar, visited a tattoo parlor around the corner and returned with her arm branded.
How does a grimy watering hole inspire such indelible loyalty? For two decades, the bar affectionately known as the Fish was a hub for downtown intellectuals, creative types, skateboarders and assorted derelicts. It was the type of place that seemed to sum up the anarchic, youthful spirit of the Lower East Side during the 1990s and, later, stand as a kind of living, punk-inflected relic while the rest of the neighborhood gained respectability.
Those who were there from Day 1 recalled a shoot for an opening sequence of “Saturday Night Live” being interrupted by a bomb threat, Iggy Pop visiting and Bob Dylan parking a limousine out front and having drinks ferried to his vehicle.
It’s a cheerful place with bright lighting, décor arranged as if by a psychedelic tornado and drinks sold at market prices of 10 years ago. The jukebox is a shrine to discerning musical tastes: Ghostface Killah, Grace Slick and the Great Society, and Geto Boys share a flipped-open page of selections. Artwork from the likes of Taylor Mead, who appeared in several Andy Warhol films, crowds the walls. The less-than-hygienic restrooms are splattered with spray paint and stickers.
Jim Jarmusch, the indie film director who made “Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai,” recalled playing pinball and spending time there with Nick Cave and Kiki Smith. One night his friend Johnny Depp, the actor, was bitten in the face during a fight, Mr. Jarmusch said. “Johnny was traumatized,” he said. “Instead of helping him, the cops asked for autographs. It was kind of a drag.”
Like CBGB’s, another famous dive that has bitten the dust, Max Fish was the creation of a free-spirited downtown figure — in this case, Ulli Rimkus, a German native who was involved with a seminal artist group called Collaborative Projects during the 1980s.
Ms. Rimkus opened Max Fish in 1989, in a vacant storefront on Ludlow Street that previously sold Judaica (from the original name, “Max Fisch” remains lettered on the transom above the door). Back then, there were no gastropubs, trattorias or herds of tiara-wearing bachelorettes on the Lower East Side. This was where stolen cars were dumped, stripped, inhabited and torched to charred exoskeletons. But it was also where an abandoned gas station could become an art studio and an urban farmer might grow strawberries in horse manure carted down from Central Park.
On Max Fish’s first night, a benefit was held for a squatter building on Avenue C and two kittens were born in a bathroom. By the following August, an arts article in The New York Times described Max Fish as “one of the most ‘happening’ bar scenes in all of downtown.” The exposure worried some of the regulars.
“I remember kind of a shockwave going around, like ‘This is going to screw everything up,’ ” said Tom Otterness, a sculptor who pitched in some cash to help Ms. Rimkus start the bar. “But it’s a very resilient scene, and everything survived.”
One of Mr. Otterness’s pieces, an anthropomorphic rodent from his “Life Underground” series at the 14th Street subway station on Eighth Avenue, now sits atop the bar. The city deemed the bronze rat in a police uniform unsuitable. “It’s like one of them wandered loose and came downtown to find a drink, or to arrest people,” Mr. Otterness said.
The police don’t come around as much these days, but back in the 1990s heroin addicts would wander into Max Fish looking for a quiet nook to fix.
“Dudes would go into the bathroom, lock themselves in there, and you’d have to get them out,” said Dave Ortiz, a longtime patron who owns a sneaker boutique in the East Village called Dave’s Quality Meat. “It wasn’t what it is today: chicks with $5,000 bags thrown on the floor drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon.”
Even if weekends now bring crowds typical of the gentrified Lower East Side, an off night might find the plastic-covered banquettes lined with timeworn regulars. One is Cowboy, an older gentleman in a 10-gallon hat who went from peddling sausages at a nearby pushcart to being a fixture at the pool table.
“It was a spot that real New Yorkers could hang and feel comfortable, and there wasn’t any one type of person that was catered to,” said Jaime Meline, a hip-hop artist from Brooklyn who performs as El-P and founded a record label called Definitive Jux. “Everyone was welcome as long as you didn’t play yourself.”
The bar’s hospitality — or, maybe more accurately, blasé cool — made Max Fish a spot where notables like James Gandolfini, Chan Marshall and Matt Dillon could comfortably share space with downtown figures like Dash Snow and Harold Hunter, both of whom have since died.
Dante Ross, a music producer, recalled drinking beers at the bar with Everlast, a Grammy-winning rapper, while they were recording “Whitey Ford Sings the Blues.” “Nobody ever acknowledged him there,” Mr. Ross said.
Even the staff, a dedicated group whose ranks turn over infrequently, is endowed with a measure of counterculture cachet.
“If you work there, it kind of gives you something of a celebrity status,” said Shannon Moore, a broad-necked man who has been a bouncer at Max Fish for a decade. “I’m sure I wouldn’t get the same response if I worked at Nice Guy Eddie’s,” a nearby sports bar, he added, before pausing. “Which I did, and no one cared.”
Word of the closing spread quickly last week, after Ms. Rimkus and her landlord, Arwen Properties, which bought the building in 2004, according to public records, were unable to reach agreement on a new lease. The landlord, Ms. Rimkus said, offered a one-year extension in exchange for a rent increase to $20,000 a month, the rights to the name Max Fish and a provision preventing her from opening a competing establishment within 25 blocks for five years.
“When you sell $3 beers, you can’t pay $20,000 in rent,” said Ms. Rimkus, who paid about $2,500 a month in the early 1990s. Several messages left with Arwen Properties, whose address is listed in the East Village, went unanswered.
Ms. Rimkus hopes to reopen Max Fish at a different location, ideally nearby. But, the nightlife corridor where she broke ground two decades ago is now so overpopulated with bars that getting a new liquor license is difficult. Last May, she tried to move the bar to Chrystie Street, but the community board recommended against the application, citing the existence of nine establishments with liquor licenses on the same block.
“We’re very upset about the situation,” said Susan Stetzer, the district manager of Community Board 3 in Manhattan. “We’re becoming a neighborhood of destination clubs. This is the Lower East Side; we don’t want it to turn into the meatpacking.”
Meanwhile, those who loved Max Fish are concentrating on providing a proper burial. On Jan. 31, the bar’s staff plans to cover the walls — now a maze of colorful geometric patterns and a rebus that reads, “I was on the stairway to heaven or was it the roadway to hell?”— in pitch black paint.
