A Tradition Ends as Bars Shut Their Doors to Dogs

Miles has been going to Ace Bar all his life.


His face has grayed there. Friends have come and gone. He never paid for a drink, but rarely walked out of the East Village bar with an empty stomach. He may have purged his dinner on the floor a time or two, his fellow bar patrons said, but who among them hadn’t done the same?


Over the past year, though, Miles has become the latest subject of what may be the city’s least funny running joke: A dog walks into a bar — and the health department threatens to issue a violation for allowing live animals in a food establishment.


“He’s a dog, but I swear he looks sad,” Mike Israely, 33, said of Miles, his 9-year-old boxer-pug mix, as the dog peered through Ace Bar’s glass doors Thursday night. “Coming here was part of our evening walk.”


Of course, it has always been a violation of the city’s health code to allow a dog anywhere near a beer tap. But for years, this has been one of the most widely — and gleefully — violated rules in the city.


Not any more.


The stricter enforcement is apparently bringing to an end a rich tradition of dog-friendly bars in New York.


“Bars are built around characters,” said Andrew Templar, an owner of Floyd NY in Brooklyn Heights, which received a violation notice after health inspectors twice observed dogs on the premises this summer. “Now it’s just people and their people problems.”


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During inspections, many owners said they were surprised to learn that dogs were not allowed even in outdoor seating areas.


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Some bars evaded formal reprimand from the city with the help of fellow pubs. In the East Village, where many watering holes are known to be dog-friendly, word spread quickly when inspectors began to crack down.
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The city’s history of dog-friendly establishments predates most of its bars. In the 19th century, saloons often housed dogs as security. Occasionally, the animals attracted crowds of gamblers, who wagered on how many penned rats a dog could kill in five minutes. (The record was 60, which New York’s champion terrier failed to break when he was dispatched to New Orleans in 1879 as the headliner of an event at Bison Williams’s Buffalo Bill House, said Christine Sismondo, the author of “America Walks Into a Bar.”)


Biff, a 3-year-old black lab, and Nick Simons, 39, at an East Village bar.
a proper neighborhood bar,” Ms. Sismondo said. “It proves you’re not one of those corporate B.Y.O.F. bars: bring your own friends.”


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And at P.J. Clarke’s in Midtown, a collie named Skippy, with an auburn coat and blackened tail, has held court for nearly a half-century. After the dog’s death in 1963, bar-goers pitched in to have him stuffed. Today, he sits, hind legs tucked in, eyes pulled wide, atop a ledge above the entrance to the handicapped bathroom. He shares the post with metal busts memorializing police officers and firefighters killed on 9/11, beside a placard that reads, “P.J. Clarke’s Remembers.”


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At Fulton Grand in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, many workers bring their animals, said Luke McDermott, co-owner of the bar. Patrons said they welcomed the guests, save for one hound with a howling habit.


“It’s the equivalent of a crying baby,” said Melissa Le, 36, from Prospect Heights. “The owner should know when a dog is fitting in with the environment.”
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“We never turn any dogs away,” said Frankie Delessio, 30, a bartender. “Humans, yes.”


He pulled out his iPhone, with which he shot a video recently: a Jack Russell terrier, paws on the bar counter, head bobbing to the music, with a vodka tonic in a glass in front of him.
“It’s O.K.; he’s 3,” Mr. Delessio said. “That’s 21 in dog years.”