The Cedar Tavern was a bar and restaurant at the eastern edge of Greenwich Village, New York City. In its heyday, known as a gathering place for avant garde writers and artists, it was located at 24 University Place, near 8th Street. It was famous in its day as a hangout of many prominent Abstract Expressionist painters and Beat writers and poets. It closed in April 1963 and reopened three blocks north in 1964, at 82 University Place, between 11th and 12th Streets.
History
1860s-1950s
The Cedar Tavern was opened in 1866 on Cedar Street, near Zuccotti Park. In 1933 it moved north to 55 West Eighth Street. In 1945 it moved east to 24 University Place. 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.
Sam and John looked to the East Village around St. Mark's Pl. to reopen after the building was sold and demolished in 1963. After a year they bought the building at 82 University Place, 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 gradually dissipated. 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 their 1967 documentary, Dont Look Back.
2000s
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. When the Cedar Tavern closed in 2006, its century-old, 50 foot mahogany bar was sold to Austin businessmen, John M. Scott and Eddy Patterson. The bar was taken apart into hundreds of pieces, transported by movers of fine art, and stored for ten years. In 2016, it was brought out of storage to serve as the centerpiece of Eberly, a restaurant in Austin, Texas. The 24 University Place site, where most of the significant events in the establishment's history occurred, is now a full-block residential building; the primary ground-floor retail space of the building's University Place frontage is occupied by a CVS Pharmacy.
The Cedar Tavern is featured in the first chapters of Augusten Burroughs' book Dry. It also appears in Joyce Glassman Johnson's memoir of Jack Kerouac, Minor Characters, and it is the setting for Dawn Powell's The Golden Spur.
In Jonathan Franzen’s novel The Corrections, Chip Lambert steals $9 from a Cedar Tavern bartender to pay for a cab to Tribeca.
The Cedar Tavern is featured in Kurt Vonnegut's Bluebeard, serving as the meeting place of fictional artist Rabo Karabekian and his Abstract Expressionist painter friends.
In the season two episode "Look, She Made a Hat," of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, Benjamin takes Midge to the Cedar Tavern to introduce her to the New Yorkart world.
