You Can Take The Brooklyn Out of Freddy's ...
The Brewery.
... and you can probably take Freddy's out of Brooklyn, too.
The Brooklyn Papers is reporting that at 8 p.m. tonight, the owner of Freddy's, the popular Dean Street, Prospect Heights bar, will pour its last pint of Brooklyn Lager.
The building is slated for demolition in Bruce Ratner's plans for the Nets arena and a surrounding development; it's owned outright by Mr. Ratner, so it's unlikely that without a massive change to the plans, the bar will survive.
Why the boycott? The Brooklyn Brewery is supporting the Ratner plan; they've got a big account with the developer out at the Nets arena. And at the new one, there are likely to be more Brooklyn drinkers than are likely to show up at one of Freddy's popular Adult Spelling Bees. (Actually, that's not a small number. Also in the backroom at Freddy's, there are great live performances. And the place is also home to a bit of a local literary scene.)
Anyway: At Freddy's, you'll get Labatt's Blue now instead of Brooklyn. Ugh.
The bar owner and the brewer kind of slap each other around in the Brooklyn Papers piece.
- Tom McGeveran
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Thing is, this "boycott" (I prefer the "think before you drink" newspeak) is a genuinely difficult decision. Great product, and an ethical brewer. But you can't drink a man's suds if he wants your bar to be knocked down. There are sensible ways to develop the Atlantic Yards, hell there may even be a sensible way to build a stadium in Brooklyn (although they're not great as moneyspinners). But this half-cocked fantasy project, which relies on bulldozing a rather busy neighborhood to build Metrotech part 2, is a horrible way to do both.