Patriot Bar Is Bane to Upstairs Neighbors

 by Barry Owens

It is just after midnight on a Friday last month and a "fight" has broken out in the middle of Chambers Street.

Traffic is halted in two lanes as a young man is thrown on the hood of a taxi cab, recovers his footing, and then knocks his opponent into the grill of an idling Honda.

Smokers mill about outside the Patriot Bar on Chambers Street. Photo: Max W. Orenstein

Both men are laughing, as the punches and forearm smashes are just a bit of sloppy slapstick between drunken friends, but few on the sidewalk are amused.


A bouncer shakes his head.

"You guys aren't coming back in here," he says.

Welcome to the Patriot Bar, where the beer is cheap, the patrons are thirsty and the music and theater sometimes spill into the street.

The bar, at 110 Chambers St., opened July 4, 2002, and has since earned a reputation from it neighbors for being loud and lascivious. Country music blares from the jukebox and chalkboard signs inside and out extol the virtues of liquor and fast women.


"Save a horse, ride a barmaid," reads one sign. "One tequila, two tequila, three tequila, floor," reads another.

"It's disgusting," said one tenant who lives above the bar. She did not want to give her name. "A horrible place, a hellhole. Drunk guys are standing in my doorway, they're vomiting on my doorway, the bartenders won't turn the music down, I haven't slept since July 3rd, 2002."

She does not live on the floor directly above the bar, but said she can still feel the boom of the bass.

"I've called 311 and complained so many times I've lost count," she said.

She said the city's Department of Environmental Protection came to her apartment to check noise levels once, but the bass would not register on the meter.

"I've learned a lot about ear plugs," said tenant Bob George, who lives in the apartment just above the two-story bar. George, a rock 'n' roll record archivist, said he is no prude but that the bar's loud music and reputation as a "vomit bar" turned him into an enemy of his downstairs neighbor.

"They've made me hate Johnny Cash," he said.

George said that his frequent requests to turn down the music have led to clashes with bar management.

"I have attempted to address the concerns on various levels, but [the tenants] still aren't satisfied," said bar-owner Charmion Raymond.
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She said the volume of the jukebox does not exceed legal levels and all but George's floor in the building have been sound-proofed. "We would have done his too, but he wouldn't let our contractor in," she said.

She said George had "threatened" the contractor and told him to leave when the bar was first moving in, a claim the tenant calls ridiculous.

"We do give people who are unauthorized to be in our building a hard time" said George. "But I'm a librarian, he's a contractor with a hammer and things, how could I threaten him?"

Still, said Raymond, "if [George] sets foot in my place, I will have him arrested."

Raymond said she had not heard any complaints about the signage at the bar, where the main decor is beer posters on the wall and bras dangling above the bar.

"I feel like I've walked into a red state," said a female patron, an attorney who lives and works in the neighborhood and was making her first visit to the bar. "But I like it. Why shouldn't Tribeca have a place like this?"