For Sale

Dive in Danger: Navy Yard Cocktail Lounge May Lose Its Home

Photo: Daniel Maurer

One of the city’s truly gritty watering holes, the Navy Yard Cocktail Lounge, may not have long for this world. Per a Douglas Elliman listing, the bar’s building (along with three others) is for sale for $3 million. A month after posting, Realtor Jeff Block hasn’t gotten takers, but he tells us he isn’t sweating the isolated location given that brick-oven pie joint Il Porto opened across the street last summer (personally, we prefer the “potempkin village” of greasy spoons that Emily Gould recently noticed).

If you plan to pay your first and last respects to J.J.’s, as it’s sometimes called, know that even professional degenerates who’ve ignored the “MEMBERS ONLY” sign on the establishment’s front door have ended up fleeing (if only at having to pay the impromptu lap dancers). A skeleton listing on Dodgeball is tagged with the following keywords: dive, guns, hookers, killers, knife fights, knives, locals, prostitutes, wharf bar. We doubt all that is merited (one timid blogger caught flack from commenters when she called it a “crack whore stripper bar”), but we’re definitely still traumatized from witnessing an unnatural act occur on the pool table there years ago. We’ll give the last word on the place to a Yelp commenter: “Places like the Navy Yard Lounge are what make me stick it out in New York in spite of out-of-control rents, $12.00 cocktails, asshole landlords, brutal winters, and everything else that makes living in NYC a big pain in the ass.”

Dive in Danger: Navy Yard Cocktail Lounge May Lose Its Home