A Legendary Hell’s Kitchen Hellhole Is Back From the Dead

Once upon a time in Hell’s Kitchen there was a watering hole the size of a family mausoleum, stuffed inside the 1/9 downtown subway at 50th and Broadway. Just before the turnstiles, the space’s single beacon was a red lightbulb casting a faint glow on yesterday’s news: The bar’s windows were covered in folds of black-and-white tabloids like a permanent work under construction.

This was Siberia, a Gotham dive-bar legend. Its master of ceremonies — or as he now calls himself, the “minister of propaganda” — was Tracy Westmoreland. His bar grew to become a dusk-till-dawn defibrillator station, a cheapo hardcore affair where rumbling train rails converged with those other ones: patrons going over their 2 a.m. lines in the loo, then wandering to newsrooms and city jobs, design studios, and Upper East brownstones. Anthony Bourdain called it his favorite bar on Earth. Jimmy Fallon was a postshow regular in his SNL days, and nightlife luminary Amy Sacco remembers, “It was like Darth Vader’s war room.”

The original location, formerly a video store, opened in 1996 and unceremoniously closed in 2001. Landlord issues. In a matter of days, Siberia corpse-revived inside an old storefront warehouse and basement — formerly a diamond-cutting operation — down the street, southwestward, at 40th and Ninth. (Fallon even helped Westmoreland move Siberia’s nicotine-stained jukebox.) That is where the party really ramped up. “The first time I went down into the basement I thought, How can there not be a body down there?,” the book publicist turned author Sloane Crosley once said. “It looked like Silence of the Lambs.” She meant it as a compliment.

Last Friday night, after two decades of figuratively sitting on ice, Siberia is now having its third act, 40 steps down into the Columbus Circle Station at 57th and Eighth. Mr. Westmoreland is again presiding. The unannounced opening night got a crowd of about 40, mostly Siberia alumni: journalists, fashion folk, former bartenders, some walk-ins off the train. Loyalty and curiosity were the takeaways. The jukebox is now of the TouchTunes variety (’70s punk, old country, rock). There is a semi-Warholian wall mural of portraiture art created by a noted painter friend Dana Nehdaran that Westmoreland met at the gym. Eight bar stools, eight foot long bar, 12-foot-high ceilings, slate floors, 750 square feet in all. “I don’t like bar stools, and I often move all the furniture out of my bars to give people more space,” says Westmoreland. Lighting is Lynchian red, a shout-out to the desolate subway.

Patrons considering doing illicit drugs will have to partake in plain sight: There isn’t a working bathroom, or a bathroom at all. There’s a communal restroom elsewhere in the station, where a door code is needed to enter. “It will become more Siberian as it gets lived in and time goes by,” says Westmoreland, who stuck to Jägermeister and a Corona bottle through his opening party. Beefy but built, Westmoreland is often mistaken for being an outlaw biker. He is intimidating until his gap-tooth smile opens wide and the bear-hugging begins.

He told me the morning after his opening that he knows that times have changed: Dive bars don’t carry the same luster. “I live a few blocks away, and I just wanted to have a place I want to go to,” he says. “There aren’t any here.” Westmoreland gauges his drink prices on what regular bars around him charge. “If they charge X amount, I charge a dollar less. And I don’t hire professional bartenders, just people I know who my clientele like.”

They are around still, here and there, the day-drinking dives and late-night speakeasies, among them Milano’s, Spring Lounge, Johnny’s Bar, Jimmy’s Corner. To many night owls, the death of after-hours fun was the closings of the Beatrice Inn (2006-2009) and Sacco’s garage-converted Bungalow 8 (2001-2009). The Meatpacking District’s bra-collecting Hogs & Heifers Saloon (1992-2015) was in the top five of swine bars until slumming-it celebrities and tourists overtook it and its rent quadrupled.

One seasoned magazine editor and Siberia regular, requesting anonymity, dropped by after a Fashion Week event, relieved that the new spot was an “actual bar … not a dive, but a bar.”

George Gurley — a former New York Observer columnist, reporter, and author who frequented both original Siberias — was excited to check out the new digs and catch up with Westmoreland. “I went there, sat down, and my body started shutting down.” He pulled an Irish good-bye around 9:30, not wanting to get pulled into later proceedings. Gurley is in his late 50s now with a wife and young boy. “I had a Bud Light and a 14-year-old single malt,” Gurley says. “My son had an allergy appointment in the morning.” He doesn’t think he’ll be quite the regular as he was before. “I don’t want to love it too much,” he adds. “I will be there when I need a little reward. It’s ten minutes from my house.”