Cedar Tavern

The Cedar Tavern (or Cedar Street Tavern) was a bar and restaurant in New York City last at 82 University Place between 11th and 12th Streets. It was famous as a former hangout of many prominent Abstract Expressionist painters and beat writers. The establishment was located at 24 University Place in its heyday, but closed in April 1963 and reopened three blocks north in 1964 in a more upscale pub style.

The Cedar Tavern was opened in 1866 on Cedar Street. In 1933 it moved to 55 West Eight Street, and in 1945 it moved to 24 University Place. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, Michael Goldberg, Landes Lewitin, James Brooks, Mercedes Matter and others of the New York School all patronized the bar in the 1950s when they lived in Greenwich Village. Historians consider it an important incubator of the Abstract Expressionist movement. It was also popular with writers Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Frank O'Hara, and LeRoi Jones. Pollock was eventually banned from the establishment for kicking in the men's room door, as was Kerouac, who allegedly urinated in an ashtray.

In 1955 the Cedar Tavern was purchased by Sam Diliberto, a butcher, and his brother in law, John Bodnar, a window washer, from Joe Provenzano. Robert Motherwell had a studio nearby in the early 50's, and he held a weekly salon for artists there. The Cedar was the closest place for them to have a drink afterwards. Pollock, DeKooning, Kline, Aristodimos Kaldis, Phillip Guston, Al Leslie and the others liked it for its cheap drinks and lack of tourists or middle-class squares. Univ. Place in those days was downmarket and dangerous because of the several welfare and single-room occupancy hotels in the area; muggings were common. Sam and John looked to the East Village around St. Mark's Pl. to reopen when the building was sold and demolished in 1963. After a year they bought the building at 82 Univ. Pl., which had been occupied by an antique store, and built the new bar in a more upscale pub style. By this time Pollock and Kline were gone, de Kooning had moved to East Hampton, and the scene never revived.

In the 1960s Tuli Kupferberg of The Fugs, David Amram, and occasionally Bob Dylan, were known to patronize the Cedar Tavern. D.A. Pennebaker, Dylan, and Bob Neuwirth met there to plan the shooting of Dont Look Back.

The old site, where most of the significant events in the establishment's history occurred, is now occupied by a large residential building, the ground floor retail space of which was most recently a women's clothing store.

Diliberto's sons Mike and Joe ran the place successfully for many years until 2006, when they decided to develop the site into condominiums. In December 2006, the Cedar Tavern closed to allow for the construction of a seven-story addition to the building in which it is housed. Its owners had pledged to reopen in six months, but an opinion piece in the December 3, 2006 edition of The New York Times speculated that it was closed for good. This proved prescient; in the wake of Joe Diliberto's death on October 27, 2007, his brother Mike failed to reopen the establishment.