Finnerty's 1.0

After one semi-tortured year living in Mid-town East (motto: now with less flavor than the UES) I was blessedly able to move to the northern part of the east village, only a few blocks away from the uber-useful Union Square subway stop. I moved in with two friends I knew from college – one male and one female. Three years on, the guy has moved to greener pastures in London while the girl and I are still living in the same sixth floor walk-up apartment, having had our third version of a third roommate move in two months ago.

While we moved into our apartment in 2004 – on a hot July day where I kinda, sorta, maybe held a half-dozen of my friends hostage and made them carry junk into my apartment before we could all head down to DC for the fourth – the move to the East Village actually started in the summer of 2003. It was that summer that I really got to know my two future roommates, R and R. I feel the need to emphasize the word “really” here, as R (the girl I still live with) always feels the need to point out that I had, in fact, pledged with the other R during college and met her in the fall of 2000. While she raises two good points, it wasn’t until the summer we spent hanging out in the city that the three of us clicked as part of the same dipsomania-based group. Anyhow, female R still had one year left in school at that point and was living in NYU housing, while male R was stuck in the wilderness and great uncharted area that is Hoboken. For my part, I was stuck in the basement section of a duplex on 54^th street. (Upside of said apartment: huge backyard; downside: no natural light. Seriously, not even a cruddy “garden window.”) Early on in June of that year, just after a few folks we know had settled into various NYU dorms, the three of us were dawn together on a random night thanks to calls from our friend Jason. It turned out that Jason had discovered a new bar right around the corner from the dorm that he was staying in, and that we should all come join him. The bar in question, located on Third Ave between 13^th and 14^th, was Finnerty’s Irish Pub.

The fact that Jason happened across this particular dive on this particular afternoon was really a stroke of dumb luck fortuitous timing: his dorm had had a fire drill at 2pm, which he took as a sign that he should blow off his afternoon session at Stern and find a bar. Luckily he didn’t have to go more than about a hundred yards to find one that fit his fancy. When R (the male) and I arrived at this new found oasis (separately, of course), we were greeted with one of the divey-est dive bars imaginable. To enter and begin quenching our thirst, we had to first go down six steps from street level – always a risky move. Inside the bar, the ceiling was about eight feet high in most places, stickers were spread indiscriminately about the walls (especially behind the bar), and five raised tables with stools provided most of the seating. Adding to the ambience of the place was a pair of dartboards in the back, an internet-enabled jukebox, and $7 pitchers of bud, bud light, and some less-than-designer – but still drinkable in mass quantities – stout. Having gone to school in Central New York (yes, “Upstate New York” actually has several regions… no seriously), we instantly fell in love. From that day forward, Finnerty’s became our de facto home base in the East Village. Oh sure, our group of seven or so would often hit up Nevada Smith’s for Wednesday Kareoke or some place like Bar None for dollar drinks on ladies night, but Finnerty’s was the “go to” watering hole, and it was here, during that summer, that R, R, and I became good friends.

When the summer of 2004 rolled around the male R and I decided we both wanted to live somewhere totally 100% more awesome than where each of us were living. Since this is NY, and more roommates = more affordable, I suggested that we try to get the other R involved in our new apartment too. She was surprisingly okay with the idea of living with two former frat guys who each outweighed her by a solid hundred pounds and had ten inches plus in height on her, so we started looking. The place we eventually found may or may not have been the best place we looked at; none of us can really remember because we were all so winded from hauling ourselves up the stairs to the top floor that first time. But the living room was huge and the bedrooms were um… bedrooms, so we considered it. Given our past history, the only logical place to consider such a decision was Finnerty’s. Conveniently, Finnerty’s was only a block away! So off we went, and as we debated things about the apartment – such as the fact that none of us had been able to locate the bathroom – we drank. After about an hour of aforementioned cheap pitchers and a discussion that gradually came to revolve around only two issues (the affordablity of the apartment and its proximity to Finnerty’s), we called the broker and told him we wanted it. Truthfully, we might have been slurring our words by then, but he got the point either way. And that, as they say, was that. Or rather, that’s the reason behind why I am here, and why the East Village has come to so deliciously dominate my life over the last few years.