New Owner Vows Puffy's Won't Change by Carl Glassman Just as she's been doing for the past 25 years, the artist Marisol walked into Puffy's Tavern one late afternoon last month and took a seat at the bar. A couple of stools down from her sat Oscar Plotkin, the man who would own the 60-year-old watering hole come Jan. 31. "Are you going to destroy the bar?" Marisol asked the owner-to-be after the two were introduced. "I hear so many stories." Plotkin, who bought the building last year and now lives upstairs, put down his glass of beer and sat up a little straighter. "I'm going to fix the walls, I'm going to fix the floor and I'm going to clean it. But nothing will change. I would not do that." "Oh, I'm glad," Marisol replied softly. Nearby stood Carl Gliko, a Puffy's bartender since 1984. "Carl," Plotkin said to him, "we should put a sign in the window: 'This bar will not change.'" Indeed, Puffy's, the quintessential neighborhood bar and Tribeca's oldest, looks much as it did 60 years ago when, as Jimmy's, it began serving breakfast and booze at daybreak to the all-night workers of the old Washington Market. When word got out that former proprietor Frank DeMarco, a 30-year Tribeca resident who had owned or co-owned Puffy's since 1979, was selling the place, rumors of the bar's demise were rampant among the regulars. Some showed up at the tavern's annual Christmas party as if they were attending a wake. True, DeMarco is selling off the juke box, with its collection of 45s, as well as the 1945 silver cash register that still opens with a kching. The ancient moose head over the bar is coming down and Plotkin is thinking of putting in a raw bar. But he said the look of the tavern-from the 85-year-old tile floor (the space was a pharmacy in its early years) to the wooden phone booth in the back-will remain much the same. The bar will close for at least two months, Plotkin said, while he awaits his liquor license and cleans and fixes up the place in ways that he insists even the most sentimental regulars will accept. "This is the ground floor of my house," he said. "I would prefer not to have things growing here." Plotkin, 51, heads Berkshire Development, a Massachusetts-based company that builds and leases box stores and warehouses around the country. After his 25-year marriage ended, he was "rather luxuriously homeless," as he puts it, living in the St. Regis Hotel for two years and the Mercer for another two years. Then he fell in love with the white, three-story terra-cotta building at Hudson and Harrison Streets. "Where do you find a 3,000-square-foot building with a very cool bar downstairs, on a major corner of New York?" he said. Having gutted and renovated the two floors above the bar and added a penthouse, Plotkin is creating a showpiece of a townhouse with fish-tank-like exposure on two sides. Looking out the giant arched windows of his third-floor corner bedroom, one has the feeling of hovering just above Hudson Street's northbound traffic. "It's wild waking up here," he said. Plotkin said he bought the bar to make sure it is "harmonious" with his home life upstairs. "It's not about money," he said. "If it were about money, Puffy's would be gone in a second. It would be a lot easier just to have Starbucks serving coffee." DeMarco, for his part, said he was ready to move on, much as Tribeca has left its former life behind. Most of the artist patrons are gone and the tavern caters to a young, after-work crowd these days. "The neighborhood doesn't exist any more the way that we knew it," said DeMarco, who bought the place with Jim Stratton and Ned Schneier, fellow locals who wanted to run Puffy's as an artist bar. A few of those artists still come in from time to time. One of them, a 28-year Tribeca resident seated in the corner with friends last month, was less than sanguine about Puffy's future. "They'll clean the bathroom, fix the floor and raise the prices," said the artist, who did not want to be identified. "It can't be, it just won't be the same." Then she paused. "I'd be glad to be wrong," she said.