Bakersfield Bar, Inwood
Bakersfield Bar, at 5060 Broadway in upper Manhattan, closed a long time ago. I lived across the street from the place in 1993, when this picture was taken. According to a Yelp review someone was murdered at Bakersfield, possibly while I lived across the street. That would be interesting to me because when I moved to another place I learned that someone had been murdered in a nearby pub just a few days or weeks before I got there.
Murder murder everywhere.
I never entered Bakersfield. I couldn’t afford to go to bars back then, and even if I could they seemed scary to me. Everything seemed scary to me in those days.
Evidently, though, Bakersfield had a somewhat distinguished pedigree. According to an August 22, 1992, story in the New York Times, “When Representative Joseph P. Kennedy, son of the late Senator Robert F. Kennedy, spoke at a conference on Irish-American affairs in the neighborhood earlier this year, he had breakfast at Bakersfield.”
I thought of Bakersfield today when I learned that a space in my neighborhood which has been a pub since the 1880s is going to reopen soon, having been closed for about 15 years. Discussions among friends about what had occupied in that space before reminded me of my belief that businesses or local governments should be required to post or make publicly available a list of every establishment that had inhabited a space before, going back as long as the building existed. This would relieve unreliable locals of their responsibility for maintaining these microhistories and unintentionally spreading bad (albeit usually harmless) information.
Certainly that type information is summonable from old phone books and public records.
