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This venue is closed.

Crypt-dark at noon or midnight, this is the Flying Dutchman of Greenwich Village pubs: Its captain's-chair barstools and dilapidated décor stand unchanged by time, trend or tide. The current crowd consists of NYU students and after-work revelers from Fifth Avenue's various publishing houses; later on, fun-city denizens come from points east, west, south and north in search of hearty meat, fish and potatoes served until 2am or 3:30am Monday through Saturday.

In the forties and fifties, still-semi-starving artists like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Franz Kline, and Robert Motherwell took time from the Abstract Expressionist search for contours of truth seen and unseen to hoist a few, get into fistfights, and hoist a few more at the Cedars. Successor to the Club, at 39 East 8th Street, the Cedars stood amid the mid-century boho belt, close to the Brevoort Hotel (11 Fifth Avenue), sometime home to Isadora Duncan, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Theodore Dreiser. While de Kooning and his wife, Elaine, used the Cedars to play out their 50-year alcoholic co-dependent soap opera, Pollock was banned for ripping the men’s-room door from its hinges. Beat writer Jack Kerouac was likewise tossed, supposedly for pissing in an ashtray. — Bruce Bennett

Though it looks as if it's been here since the Dutch first settled Manhattan, Cedar Tavern actually moved to its current home in the early '60s; the original location was a few blocks south.