Bridge Cafe, New York City

What happened

Drink has been sold at the corner of Water and Dover streets since 1794, when a grocery and wine and porter bottler opened there, and the business that ended in 2012 was the last of a line that the city directories enter variously as a grocery, a porterhouse and a liquor establishment. The building is younger than the trade it is famous for. The Landmarks Preservation Commission's designation report for the South Street Seaport Historic District dates 279 Water Street to 1801 and calls it the only wood-frame building left in the district, Water Street being landfill that was thought unable to carry brick. Henry Williams kept a brothel here between 1847 and 1860, the women listed in the 1855 city census. Maurice Hyland raised the two-and-a-half-storey house to three flat-topped storeys in 1888. As McCormick's Bar in the 1970s it opened at four in the morning for the men of the Fulton Fish Market, and it was renamed the Bridge Cafe in 1979. Hurricane Sandy put water through it in October 2012.

What is there now

Shut, and briefly dressed as somewhere else. Netflix painted 'Black Rabbit' on the transom in 2024 and used the room as the set for a series of that name, and Tribeca Citizen reported that May that a Bridge Cafe NYC LLC had been approved by Community Board 1 to run a bar and restaurant there again, on a plan to put it back much as it was. A reader commenting on that report at the end of December 2024 said it was still closed. The New York State Liquor Authority's list of active licences, checked on 11 September 2026, holds no licence at 279 Water Street, and neither does its pending list.

Location recorded from OpenStreetMap, 279 Water Street, found through Nominatim (https://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=279+Water+Street,+Manhattan,+New+York).

Sources

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