Ulli Rimkus has a complicated relationship to alcohol. She is the owner and proprietor of a bar called Max Fish, on Ludlow Street, on the Lower East Side, which means that she works full time in the alcohol industry. But in hiring bartenders Rimkus tends to follow a simple rule: no bartenders need apply; she prefers glassblowers and silk-screeners, rappers and skateboarders. She grew up in Germany, and she has always been discomfited by the pushiness of some American establishments, where any empty glass is viewed as a sales opportunity. On weekend nights, it can be difficult to get served, especially since, in the past twenty-one years, there has rarely been a shortage of people needing service. The metal grate doesn’t roll up until 5:30 P.M., because Rimkus never liked the idea of enabling daytime drunks, but it doesn’t roll back down until 4 A.M., which marks the start of New York State’s daily moratorium on the sale of alcohol for on-site consumption. There are people who say that Rimkus doesn’t drink, but they are wrong: she does, although not very often, or very much. Veterans of the bar remember that, during the frenzied early years, Rimkus would celebrate the end of another busy night by pouring herself a small glass of brandy from a bottle whose presence, if it had been detected, might have surprised many of the patrons; their tastes ran, and still run, toward cheap whiskey and cheaper beer. (There is no basement, and therefore nowhere to keep kegs, and therefore nothing on tap.) For Rimkus, alcohol is, if not quite a necessary evil, then a necessary concession: she wanted to create a place where her artist friends could hang out after work, and the only sensible way to do this was to sell them drinks.
When Max Fish opened, in 1989, it was an anomaly: a cheerful Technicolor sanctuary that seemed like a rebuke to the half-abandoned neighborhood surrounding it, and to the sepulchral aesthetic then (and now) prevalent in downtown bars. Rimkus wanted her place to be bright and friendly—“So that women would feel more comfortable,” she says—and first-time visitors often blink and scowl at the handmade chandeliers, searching in vain for a shadowy corner. The bar was a success even before it was a bar. During the months Rimkus had to wait for a liquor license, she turned the space into an informal art gallery, and, after the bar opened, the gallery remained, with paintings and photographs hung high, to deter impetuous would-be collectors.
Over the years, Max Fish became surprisingly influential, home to a loose confederation of artists and layabouts and doers and be-ers, and the inspiration for similar establishments around the country. For a certain kind of culturally curious young local or transplant, Max Fish was a comfortable place to blow off steam for a few nights or a few years; you could call it the ultimate hipster bar, if only that didn’t sound like an insult. As a consequence, it was also a catalyst for what one patron calls “the rehipifying of the Lower East Side,” which means that, on Ludlow Street today, Max Fish is, once more, an anomaly: a respectable old-timer in a neighborhood full of boisterous newcomers. The neighborhood has become what urban sociologists call a nightscape, full of restaurants and lounges and ostentatious establishments trying hard to be both. So it was no great shock when, in December, word came that the rent had risen past what Rimkus could pay, and Max Fish might have to close. Even a celebrated neighborhood institution can sell only so many three-dollar Pabsts.
Rimkus is tall and beautiful, in a serious sort of way, with long wavy hair that she blows straight, and bangs that she trims perfectly horizontal; the severity of her haircut contrasts pleasingly with her wardrobe, which is fuzzy (she loves fake fur, the more synthetic the better) and colorful. Her favorite interjection is a sharp exhalation—“Aah!”—which is often provoked by someone else taking a simple thing (the renewal of a lease, say) and making it complicated. The people she hires tend, like the patrons, to stick around. The first employee was a charming and easygoing artist and musician named Harry Druzd, who is also the father of Rimkus’s daughter, Sadie, a college freshman; the relationship didn’t last, but Druzd and Rimkus remained close, and he still tends bar two nights a week. Marc Razo has worked as a Max Fish bartender for fourteen years. Like all his colleagues, Razo maintains a clutch of impressive sidelines (he is the founder of a popular annual guitar battle called Shred for Your Life, which began in the back room of Max Fish), and he is devoted to Rimkus. “She’s co-signed every one of my apartments,” he says. “She’d bail me out of jail.”
In December, a few days before Max Fish celebrated its twenty-first birthday, Rimkus made an announcement: she was going to roll down the grate for good on January 31st. The birthday party had been delayed, so that it wouldn’t coincide with Art Basel Miami Beach, the yearly art fair and weeklong party, which siphons away many of Rimkus’s best friends and best customers. (In 2009, a gallery paid for her to re-create the entire bar in downtown Miami, as an art installation.) The birthday party was also a funeral, and various Max Fish T-shirts were in evidence: one was red with fat blue polka dots, reproducing the pattern painted on one of the bar’s walls. At least two regulars ducked out to commemorate the occasion by getting a tattoo: a broken bottle bearing the letters “M” and “F,” shedding a single tear. There were anguished posts on Facebook and Twitter, and on local blogs. The Times printed a valediction, which included a list of famous customers, regular and not: Iggy Pop, Jim Jarmusch, Johnny Depp, Bob Dylan (who reportedly ordered his drinks to go, from a nearby car), James Gandolfini. Another venerable dive, an East Village punk-rock hangout called Mars Bar, was also facing extinction, and some nostalgic New Yorkers (is there any other kind?) worried that a certain downtown spirit was disappearing, too.
Rimkus didn’t seem to be in mourning, though: she was already thinking about the next Max Fish. She must have visited every available retail space on the Lower East Side, and there are plenty—in recent years, exuberant developers and optimistic landlords may have overestimated the demand for high-end commercial real estate in the neighborhood. But the local community board, alarmed by the growing Lower East Side party zone, has voted against many liquor-license applications, including one made by Rimkus, last year, for a location on Chrystie Street, a few blocks west. When not walking and driving around with real-estate agents, peering appraisingly into sneaker stores and failing boutiques, she had been attending political meetings and courting allies; by comparison, the ordinary grind of owning and operating a bar seemed almost like a reprieve.
One afternoon when Rimkus walked into Max Fish, a couple of employees were busy cleaning up, and there was a pile of wheeled pallets stacked up on the bar, like primitive skateboards. She restocked the whiskey and the vodka—it’s part of her daily routine—and scanned the corners for trash and empties. Max Fish occupies the first floor of an apartment building, and its dimensions are roughly tenement standard: twenty feet wide and eighty feet deep. The long wall on the left is the art gallery; a curved royal-blue bar runs halfway down the long wall on the right. There are closets at the halfway point, on either side, which usually create a bottleneck as people squeeze toward the back, where there is a pool table covered (except for the playing surface) in stickers advertising bands and skateboard companies. There are two bathrooms, each with a maximum occupancy of one; this rule is enforced as consistently as humanly possible—which is to say, occasionally. Above the pool table there was a makeshift nativity scene, a snowman, and some Christmas lights.
“Oh, my God,” Rimkus said. “Someone gave the snowman a beer.” She hopped up on a bench and retrieved a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon, which she placed on the pool table. “He’s way too young to be drinking,” she said.
As Rimkus inspected the mismatched banquettes and rummaged through the bar’s bulging closets, she was also compiling a rough estimate. “We have to measure everything,” she said. “We have to think about what we would keep, what we would give away.” One idea that the landlord had floated was a one-year extension, with little rent increase, on the condition that, when the year was up, she would turn over the bar and everything in it—including, one presumes, her customers, and maybe part of her reputation. A neighborhood bar relies on loyalty and habit, and, while the one would keep true devotees away from a replacement Max Fish, the other would nudge casual patrons toward it. Subtract Rimkus, her staff, and their friends, and Max Fish wouldn’t be Max Fish, but it might nevertheless be successful; certainly there would be plenty of potential customers on the streets outside, some of whom might mistake the new place for the old one they had heard about. Rimkus hated that idea, and she wanted to make sure there would be no confusion about whether or not an era had ended. So she decided that Max Fish would close one day early, on January 30th; employees and volunteers would spend the next day painting the walls black, to force the next occupants to start from scratch. She was characteristically dismissive—“Aah!”—of the landlord’s stratagem, but others, including Druzd, expressed their dismay more passionately. “Like the Russians, when Napoleon invaded,” he said. “Burn the bridges, throw the animals in the wells, leave nothing behind.”
Rimkus arrived in New York from Düsseldorf in 1977, when she was in her twenties. Even before she crossed the Williamsburg Bridge into Manhattan, she decided to stay. “I was just, like, ‘Oh, my God,’ ” she says. “The buildings, the graffiti, just the sense of space!” She was an eager young artist with an eager young artist boyfriend, Christof Kohlhofer, and they found an apartment on East Thirteenth Street. She kept a duffelbag by the door, because arson was epidemic, and she wanted to be prepared in case she woke up with her bedroom on fire. In 1978, she and Kohlhofer moved to Ludlow Street, which felt like the southern frontier of downtown. It was one of many streets that hadn’t recovered from the tenement boom of the early twentieth century, when landlords filled much of southeastern Manhattan with nearly identical apartment buildings, and filled the buildings with recent arrivals, mainly from Eastern Europe. The population of the Lower East Side had already begun to decline by the time of the restrictive 1924 Immigration Act; soon, there was a tenement glut, and landlords began tearing the buildings down, or letting them rot. An influx of Puerto Rican residents went some way toward repopulating the neighborhood, although a small-industry exodus left many of the bigger buildings vacant.
The apartment building that Rimkus and Kohlhofer found, near the corner of Ludlow and Stanton, was close to uninhabitable, and they persuaded its owner to let them live there, more or less free, on the condition that they rebuild it. They had more time than money, so this seemed like a great idea; they set about stripping and replacing the walls and ceilings, sometimes scavenging parts and material from nearby lots. At one point, when Rimkus needed a sink, she grabbed one from a deserted building across the street; it was her bad luck to make this acquisition in full view of some police officers, who arrested her for trespassing. One of the people who helped bail her out of jail was the artist Kiki Smith, who moved to Ludlow Street not long after Rimkus did. “The main thing was, never let any government people in the building, because they’d condemn it,” Smith says.
Rimkus, Kohlhofer, and Smith were all members of an artists’ collective called Collaborative Projects, Inc., or Colab, which set out to reclaim some of the neighborhood’s unused spaces. On December 30, 1979, members used bolt cutters, transported inside an acoustic-guitar case, to break into an empty storefront on Delancey Street, where they installed “The Real Estate Show,” an art exhibit that was also, according to its manifesto, a “preëmptive and insurrectionary” action. The organizers spoke the language of class solidarity, although they were alert to the paradox of their situation: many of them were residents, but few of them were locals. The manifesto acknowledged that “artists, living and working in depressed communities, are compradors in the revaluation of property and the ‘whitening’ of neighborhoods.” The show was a success, in a way: the authorities shut it down, and the influential German artist Joseph Beuys attended a press conference outside the building the following week. (The building was eventually razed, replaced by a vacant lot that became a parking lot; residents have waged a decades-long battle over the amount of low-income housing that should be in a proposed development that includes the site.) The artists reached an agreement with city authorities to take possession of 156 Rivington Street, across from a lawyer’s office that had a half-eroded sign: “Abogado Notario.” The artists named their space ABC No Rio, after the letters that remained, and the building became a scruffy multi-floor meeting center and performance space. The artists who created it also functioned, however unwillingly, as compradors; their pioneering occupations helped reinforce a process of property “revaluation” that is ongoing.
Like many members of Colab, Rimkus never expected to make a living in the art world. When she needed a job, the sculptor Tom Otterness introduced her to some of his friends at Tin Pan Alley, a friendly if chaotic bar in Hell’s Kitchen, where petty thieves and sex-industry professionals were served alongside punks and artists and activists. The photographer Nan Goldin was a regular and a part-time employee; in her work, the bar appears as a bleary break room, full of souls working up the courage to leave it. Rimkus was hired, joining a mainly female staff led by one of the owners, Maggie Smith, a prisoners’-rights activist. In her years at Tin Pan Alley, Rimkus met some of the future Max Fish stalwarts, including Druzd and Allan Windsor, who became Max Fish’s gruff elder statesman—a kind but potentially intimidating server who stands out because he never seems to be goofing off. Windsor, who is black, remembers being impressed by the staff at Tin Pan Alley. “This bar in Times Square, run by all white women? I figured they must have been, like, tough lesbians, or something,” he says. Rimkus also received a useful lesson in crowd control: “You know what I learned? You can walk up to any crazy lunatic and say”—she applies a friendly but firm hand to the arm—“ ‘Look, man.’ ”
Tin Pan Alley closed in 1988. Druzd remembers the day, in early 1989, when he and Rimkus were walking down Ludlow Street and she noticed a shuttered storefront, the former home of a Jewish memorabilia store named for its owner, Max Fisch. Rimkus liked the idea of creating a neighborhood hangout, up the street from her house and a few blocks from ABC No Rio. She scraped together forty thousand dollars from other artists to cover the first few months’ rent and the first round of renovations. She enlisted her friend Gregg Woolard to help design the place, and curate the wall; the name remained, in a streamlined form. (The window above the front door still says “Max Fisch.”) Rimkus knew she wanted games—pinball and pool—so that women who stopped by would have something to do even if they didn’t know anyone. On opening night, drinks were served by Druzd and Brandon Holley, a recent Barnard graduate who had to find a way to break the news to her parents. “I’m not really tending bar,” she told them. “I’m kind of working at a gallery.” Woolard curated the temporary exhibits, and helped Rimkus assemble the bar’s permanent collection: a three-foot nail, protruding from one wall (one patron eventually discovered that it was sturdy enough to swing from; others are discouraged from confirming this); a light box with a photograph of Julio Iglesias, with the right side of his face melted into a Joker-like smile.
Right from the start, Max Fish was a high-volume, low-margin business: in 1989, a can of Budweiser cost two dollars, and the bartenders had a tacit agreement to decline orders for drinks that contained more than three ingredients. On weekend nights, the front room became a heaving scrum. Something about the place—its buoyant décor, perhaps, or its relatively open floor plan, which usually guarantees that standers will outnumber sitters—seemed to discourage moderation, and Max Fish became known as a bar where fights, though rare, were by no means shocking. Holley’s tenure at the bar lasted only a year; it ended after an altercation between her boyfriend and a Max Fish regular, the irascible downtown luminary known as Rockets Redglare. “Ulli said, ‘It’s the boy or the baah,’ ” Holley recalls. She chose the boy, and began a life in publishing. (She is now the editor-in-chief of Lucky.)
Every once in a while, the old neighborhood made itself known inside this new establishment. A notorious local drug dealer once objected to the way a bartender poured his drink; when she declined to re-pour, he offered her a glimpse of his pistol, and her feelings on the matter rapidly evolved. More commonly, bartenders had to contend with dealers’ clients. Kiki Smith worked for a time as an electrician, and it took her a while to figure out that those people she passed on Ludlow Street, some of them her friends, weren’t up bright and early—they were up dark and late, looking for a fix. In Ann Marlowe’s memoir, “How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z,” Max Fish gets its own entry. “One of the reasons for the bar’s popularity was that you could cop on Ludlow Street or within a block in either direction,” she writes, although that doesn’t seem like an advantage for management—heroin users aren’t necessarily big drinkers. Max Fish somehow survived the heyday of the Ludlow Street drug bazaar, just as, less happily, it survived some of its favorite customers, including Rockets Redglare, who died in 2001—of liver and kidney failure.
“You can come and you don’t have to drink,” Rimkus said, early one night, before the crowds arrived. She paused—this wasn’t quite true. “I mean, you can’t just be a drifter. You have to add something. We had this homeless guy, Eddie.” She pointed to a faded Polaroid on the wall behind her, next to a wooden case containing the bar’s collection of V.H.S. tapes of old action movies and skateboard videos. “He was a shaap dresser, man—he dressed out of the garbage.”
It was nearly seven, and Windsor was measuring out a pair of tequila shots for a young couple who had just finished a game of pool. Farther down the bar, he saw a man get up and amble toward the door. “Yo! Yo! Yo!” he said, and the man turned around. Windsor gestured toward the man’s friend, still seated, and asked, meaningfully, “He got you?” By now, Windsor can detect an honest misunderstanding in its early planning phase.
Rimkus varies the bartender lineup from week to week—“So the bartenders’ friends don’t make it their own place,” Druzd says. Holley adds another, more practical reason: “There was a whole thing where bartenders would buy”—which is to say, give—“each other drinks. She didn’t like that.” Similarly, Rimkus has never invested heavily in music: the jukebox is stocked with homemade CD compilations—recent hip-hop, nineties indie rock, ancient punk—but it’s not turned up very loud, and live performances are sporadic and casual. “Music is actually not that great,” she says. “If you have a band, everybody comes to see the band, and then they leave.”
These decisions underscored Rimkus’s devotion to all of her workers and regulars individually but to no scene in particular. Although Max Fish originally drew from the art-punk energy of the eighties, Rimkus seemed just as excited about newer manifestations of the old downtown spirit: skaters, graffiti crews, the kids from the Larry Clark film “Kids.” For a time, crispy-clean sneakers outnumbered beat-up boots; part of the fun is watching the different micro-generations coexist and, occasionally, collide.
One day in 1997, the Daily News published a story with a startling headline: “DEVIL LANDLORD: COPS CHARGE HE’D KILL TO INCREASE RENT.” The landlord in question was Mark Glass (whose legal name was Alvin Weiss), and he was accused of hiring a local drug dealer to kill one of his tenants. The police created a fake crime scene to make him think that the plot had been successful; in fact, the tenant was under police protection. Glass eventually pleaded guilty to arson and attempted murder; he was sentenced to a maximum of fourteen years and served ten. Glass, it turned out, owned much of the neighborhood: he was the landlord who let Rimkus and Kiki Smith pay rent through renovation. (Smith remembers him as “a great landlord.”) It was also Glass who, in 1989, gave Rimkus a lease for the artists’ bar she wanted to start.
After Glass went to prison, control of the Max Fish building passed to Arwen Equities Partners, which seems disinclined to play favorites or start feuds—good news, perhaps, for recalcitrant tenants, but less so for a beloved and modestly profitable local landmark. As the monthly rent edged up from a few thousand dollars into the low five figures, Rimkus realized that the property’s market value was increasing more quickly than her income. Last year, when the rent jumped again, she decided that it was time to go. The follow-up offer—an extra year in exchange for her good name and twenty-two years of carefully curated debris—felt to her like a final insult.
It was early January, and, with the move-out date only a few weeks away, Arwen had suddenly made Rimkus a new, ambiguous offer: it had invited her to sign a one-year extension, no strings attached, but without guaranteeing that anybody from the company would be willing to countersign. “I feel like this is something to distract me,” she said, although there was no reason not to give it a try. She arranged to meet up with Lucien Bahaj, who operates a French bistro, the Pink Pony, in the storefront next door, which he sublets from her. Bahaj was waiting outside the Pink Pony when Rimkus arrived, wearing a furry leopard-print coat, wide-legged light-blue jeans, and bright-green suède sneakers. They walked up to Houston Street to catch a taxi to Arwen’s offices, in the meatpacking district, a neighborhood that often serves as a cautionary tale—its swift transformation from quasi-industrial borderland to high-end night-life district is an example of how quickly a place can be rendered unrecognizable.
“Aah!” Rimkus said, when the taxi came to a stop on West Fourteenth Street. “The evil neighborhood.” She kicked a big metal ring embedded in the cobblestones. “From the old meat market,” she said. “Maybe that’s where they kept the cattle.”
They found the building and walked down a long hall to a lobby, with a glassed-in receptionist, and then into a small, empty conference room, where they signed copies of a possibly meaningless lease and made small talk with an Arwen representative. When it was over, they couldn’t figure out whether to feel relieved or angry or doubly anxious.
As the countdown to the end of Max Fish progressed, something odd happened: the initial burst of sorrow seemed to fade. Druzd said, “When I first started working here, I thought, Well, I’ll just work here ten years.” Perhaps he didn’t entirely hate the idea of having a reason to leave. Marc Razo, after allowing himself five minutes of unadulterated sadness, began making plans: he wanted to visit Hawaii, and maybe spend some time in the Philippines, where his father comes from; maybe he would finally have the time to expand the guitar battle into a national tour. Allan Windsor was thinking about getting a commercial driver’s license.
Some patrons, too, started to imagine the possibilities: what would their lives look like without Max Fish? Through good luck, good timing, and great instincts, Rimkus had created a place where everything slowed down: where you could do nothing in particular for five hours without getting restless, where a grownup could drink until three without feeling conspicuous—at least, not until he tiptoed into the office the next day. To be a true regular at Max Fish is hard work: it requires hours of commitment, three or four or six nights per week, and may not leave a lot of space for other pursuits. The bar’s best-known patrons are probably the least representative, because none of them ever had enough spare time to be considered a fixture. That’s one of the charms of the place: just about everyone feels, relatively speaking, like an occasional visitor.
The sociologist Elizabeth Currid has listed Max Fish as a bar that nurtures the kind of creative community that makes New York great—she even put pictures of its polka-dot wall on the front and back covers of her book “The Warhol Economy.” But a claim like that gives Max Fish at once too much credit and too little. Plenty of establishments have clients who consider themselves creative; not many inspire tattooed tributes. It seems disrespectful, somehow, to pretend that Max Fish’s greatest legacy is its contribution to the culture industry. Most of the important things that happen there can’t, in retrospect, be described as productive—or, for that matter, important, at least to anybody who wasn’t there. In one of the city’s most abnormal neighborhoods, Rimkus built an experimental art gallery that is also, on its best nights, a relatively normal neighborhood bar.
There were only a few weeks left in January when Rimkus finally got a call from her landlord: the lease had been countersigned, and the bar had an extra year. She sounded relieved but slightly dazed, and so did her employees and regulars, some of whom had grown attached to their dreams of transformation, however far-fetched. A few hours after the announcement, Marc Razo was setting up the bar when his cell phone buzzed. It was a text message from a regular, a ubiquitous but in no way famous creative type, a guy who might seem marginal in some worlds but certainly not in this one. “He’s pissed,” Razo said. “I think he thought he was going to get sober.”
The good news did nothing to change Rimkus’s determination to find a new place in the neighborhood for Max Fish. “I feel like it’s not finished,” she said. Her stubbornness is the flip side of the restlessness that made her want to transform Max Fisch’s shop into a bar. The transformations continued even as Max Fish stayed the same, and now the kind of people who were once the bar’s core demographic—barely legal drinkers, hovering on the fringes of this or that scene—have fewer reasons to leave Brooklyn, which years ago inherited the Lower East Side’s reputation as an urban frontier, along with a good chunk of its population. It’s easy to say that the Lower East Side doesn’t seem as cool as it used to, but then the neighborhoods perceived as cool are often the ones that are changing the most quickly. It’s cool for a guerrilla gallery to spring up in a vacant building; it’s not cool when quirky old businesses start getting priced out. But, in New York, at least, the first change often prefaces, or even guarantees, the second. Maybe a pioneering bar like Max Fish contains within it the seeds of its own destruction. Doubtless, the Lower East Side would have gone shiny without Max Fish—but maybe not so quickly.
For now, though, Rimkus is trying to stay. She still lives on Ludlow Street, and she still hates the idea of being driven out of her neighborhood. One afternoon, she inspected a newly built storefront around the corner. The real-estate agent was trying to be helpful. “You could have a d.j. in here, in a cage,” she said, pointing to the back corner.
“Or a little kitchen, or something,” Rimkus murmured.
Across the street, the agent showed off a grand concrete-and-glass rectangle full of workers. “This is the Japanese fusion restaurant,” she said. “They’re going to have waterfalls here. It’s going to be nice. They have a few, already, in Long Island. I told them, ‘You have to come to the Lower East Side.’ ” ♦
