Monday, February 7, 2022

The Topless Bar and the Tapas Bar

Years ago, I lived in the Dunwoodie Heights section of Yonkers,  about two miles from my current neighborhood, which is the Woodlawn-ish neighborhood which straddles the Yonkers/Bronx border.  The Dunwoodie house was best described as a beach house without an ocean- there were four of us who had known each other for many years, helping a friend pay his mortgage by paying him an almost perfuctory rent (basically, enough to cover the mortgage payment).  We would always have visitors over, and twice a year, we'd through huge parties with over 100 guests- that was the only way to do the major housecleaning... you had to clean before company came over, and you'd REALLY have to clean the day after the beer bash.  We'd always tell the neighbors, even invite them, and we never received any complaints.  The neighborhood is a safe one, a blend of working class and middle class, native-born and immigrant.  

We were a block north of a small commercial strip on Yonkers Ave, a couple of takeout joints, a small supermarket (I believe the term 'superette' should suffice), a pastry shop, and a couple of bars.  One of the bars is a low-key, low-rent topless joint, fairly unobtrusive but a bit of an anomaly in a neighborhood like that.  It never really attracted much ire from the neighborhood, and nobody ever seemed inclined to shut it down.  We're a live-and-let-live bunch for the most part.  Oddly enough, though, it seemed like every ten years or so, somebody would get killed in the place.  I've been combing through the news archives trying to document a shooting around 1990, which actually made a national 'true crime' show, but haven't turned up anything yet.  The second shooting took place around around 2000, and two friends of mine met there for a beer the next day, and wondered why the place was abandoned.  Recently, there was a non-fatal stabbing and a brawl in which a firefighter put some guy in a coma.  As I said, the neighborhood is a generally safe one, but I would joke that, if you wanted to get murdered in Dunwoodie, the topless bar was the place to go.  Even with the periodic mayhem, there really haven't been any calls to shut the place down.

There's a new contender for Dunwoodie murder spot... taking the mantle from the topless bar is the tapas bar.  In the wee hours of Sunday morning, there was an altercation in which an individual shot two employees, one of whom died.  I have to say that I might have been to the place once, soon after it opened, but I recall a time when it was owned by a wannabe wiseguy who spent his parents' money on coke and a vanity project as an aspiring bar owner.  Yeah, not a great place, especially when you hear a stray rumor of the owner keeping a gun in his office, probably next to the cocaine supply.  Oddly enough, even though the tapas bar has a lower body count than the topless bar, there are calls to shut the place down.  It's on the ass-end of the commercial stretch, across from an apartment building, so it's more obtrusive than the topless joint, which really doesn't seem to raise anyone's ire.

Now I have to change my routine- there's more than one spot to be murdered in Dunwoodie.

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