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We had to negotiate how repairs were going to be done. I worked at Bailey House, and met the owners of Keller’s Bar one day during a rainstorm. A leak formed in the roof in which our buildings shared.
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White men were not permitted inside, unless the bouncers at the door happened to be in a good mood. It was a place where the most closeted of men could sneak off to without being caught. It was located along the Westside Highway-away from the heavy traffic of the gay West Village. Keller’s was at the very tip of Christopher Street, around the corner from what is now “Bailey House.
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Only pieces of the cursive lettering which made up the red neon sign still glowed, welcoming those who were brave enough to enter the musty corridor. The place got its name from the hotel the building once was. I never made it past the first pool table, near the bar and the exit door to explore what regulars called ‘the dark room’.Įven the neon sign above the entrance to the place which read “Keller’s Hotel” did not light up entirely. The place was dark and what went on in the far back room of that place is anyone’s guess. Drunkards had to be careful when they walked around, cruising for pieces of ass and big stiff ones. The floors were wooden, but had slowly rotted over time. There were two pool tables and several pinball machines inside. Long before the rise of Hip Hop culture, when it was not so fashionable to be an out-of-the-closet homo-thug, Keller’s was a place where men from the projects and their admirers could hang out on the ‘down-low’. The staff comes from Harlem, the Bronx, sometimes Brooklyn (we even had bartenders from New Jersey) and it’s safe heaven for the mostly black queer community uptown and it’s relatively close to home.”Ģ376 Adam Clayton Powell Jr Blvd.Keller’s Bar has been closed for more than a decade. “It’s a neighborhood bar where everyone knows your name and that has an identity very much like the community that it serves. “In my humble opinion, there’s no other place like Alibi Lounge for the queer community in NYC especially in northern Manhattan and its borders,” Minko told Paper Magazine. According to the GoFundMe page, it took two assaults on the community safe space before NYPD made an arrest. A vandal set fire to Alibi’s rainbow flags on two occasions during Pride Month in 2019.
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The coronavirus pandemic isn’t the first hardship to hit Alibi in recent years. Contributions will go towards helping him “keep my black/latino LGBTQ employees on payroll, pay rent, taxes, and utilities covering the months we quarantined.” He’s already raised $26,000 of the club’s $50,00 goal as of Tuesday, June 9. Minko is now fighting to save the bar with a GoFundMe.
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Minko only reopened for takeout in mid-May, for two days a week and now has series of required payments. Alibi did not receive any pandemic assistance from the government and to make matter worse, burglars broke into the bar and stole its cash register while the business was closed for the pandemic. Alibi was forced to shut its doors on March 16 to adhere to NYC’s COVID-related restrictions and has continued to face financial challenges. Owner Alexi Minko opened Alibi Lounge in 2015, a decade after immigrating to New York from Gabon, with the hopes of creating a safe heaven for the LGBTQ community of Harlem. As we enter Pride Month 2020, in the midst of a global fight for racial equality, Manhattan’s only black-owned LGBTQ+ bar, is in danger of shutting its door for good.