The Dove is closing. Tomorrow.
When I heard the news that they were closing in just a few days, I had the odd feeling that I should stay away, like when you find out a friend is moving and you avoid them so you won’t have to confront the reality of saying goodbye. Besides, I didn’t want to be sad. The Dove is not a place where I’ve been sad. And can you really be friends with a bar, anyway?
Luckily, my sister had a baby, and so I could do what I love most: sashay into The Dove, a little too late in the night to be respectable, and have a good time with my people. Because the people at The Dove are always my people, even if we’ve just met. And while I toasted to my nephew, I thought about this:
They say you never want to visit a place, you want to visit a time, and that’s true. Living in New York is like getting a daily walking tour of your personal nostalgia. Here’s where I had my first date, here’s the bodega that’s now a store where I bought blueberries the summer I worked at that place, here’s where I cried in public when my grandmother died, here’s where that friend I no longer know had a birthday party, etc. In a place that constantly shifts, the memories are the only constants. And when you find a constant here, it concretes itself into your heart, an anchor in the majestic turbulence of this urban life.
I moved into this neighborhood eleven years ago. After college, I moved to Astoria, but when a friend asked my best friend and I to share a tiny apartment on Thompson Street, we said adios to Queens and sailed into Manhattan. Sex and The City had just ended, and we were ready to assume the mantle of upward mobility and glamorous living. Luckily, The Dove opened just a few weeks after we arrived, and it was the perfect spot for what I knew was going to be my now fabulous life. It was like me, fancy but inclusive. Champagne was a $1 more than a mixed drink, which led me to a spiritual awakening - my life would no longer be an unremarkable string of vodka-cranberries. My future, my destiny, was a life filled with bubbles. Hitch a ride and shoot straight to the top.
The first time I perched on a stool at The Dove, I met the owners, Jen and Hen. I thought they were so glamorous because they reapplied their eye shadow at midnight. They poured me and my best friend an extra glass of wine, on the house. “For the neighborhood girls,” they said. That’s when I knew our love was real.
I grew up in Hawai’i, and when people ask me why I live in New York, I joke that Manhattan is also an island. But really I want to describe the singular pleasure of toddling home in the predawn hours, of seeing streets empty but for a few barkeeps and stragglers, of knowing the everyone else had their fun but had to leave, and you don’t have to leave because you live here. And you’re good at it.
Which is why I will probably miss The Dove most. I won’t list all the parties I threw, or regret any of the hangovers. But I’ll miss coming whenever I please, training the newest bartender on my signature drink, telling anyone who comes in right before closing that I’ve rented the whole bar out just for myself, but I’ll allow them to stay.
This is the loss, then: They know me there. It’s a sweet kind of triumph to wrestle this city into a place where you feel like you belong, and like I asked my friend over text, “Where will I go now when good shit happens?”
The other day I saw this quote, “Just when you think you’ve figured out life, something has to change.”
So change has come, just when I thought I had figured it all out. I can’t visit all the versions of myself that I’ve been over the past eleven years, but a good number of those versions have held court at The Dove. And I am grateful for that. I might not have survived some days without it. It’s weird to say, but The Dove feels like a friend, and in some ways it raised me. So goodbye to my sweet friend. You are so precious to me. Thank you for our time together. You were the first place that made me feel like I could make it here.
The von Hottie cocktail, invented at The Dove:
The rest prosecco or sparkling wine.
Add a lemon twist and a zest for life.
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