West End Bar

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The West End bar, also known as the "West End Gate", is located on Broadway near 114th Street in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of the Borough of Manhattan in New York City. Since its establishment in 1911, the bar has served as a popular gathering place for Columbia University undergraduates (its slogan is "Where Columbia Had Its First Beer"). The bar was also a meetingplace for many Beat Generation writers as well as many 1960s student activists when they attended the university.

[edit] History

In the early 1940s, in the formative days of the Beat generation, students including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Lucien Carr spent hours at the bar discussing their studies and their futures. In the 1960s, the bar was host to student activists upset about racial discrimination in the area and US foreign policy regarding Vietnam. Mark Rudd, who led the Columbia branch of Students for a Democratic Society and was a promninent member of the Weather Underground after his expulsion from the university in 1968, spent time at the bar while a student.

After closing for a year and a half, it was bought in 1990 by Katie Gardner, a graduate of Columbia's School of Journalism. She and her family installed a back room for beer pong, a basement area for parties, and a side room for dancing, and the bar became popular especially among university freshmen. It became notorious, however, for allowing underaged drinkers, with or without ID. However, the bar began to crack down on underage drinking since it was shutdown by the police in February 2005.

In late 2004, the bar began brewing its own brand of "Ker O'Whack" beer. The bar also serves food, including a widely popular Sunday brunch. It recently installed flatscreen monitors for advertising, and has several televisions showing a regular stream of sports coverage. As a result of all these improvements, Playboy Magazine featured The West End as college bar of the month in its February 2005 issue.

[edit] Present day

The West End qua West End closed in April 2006, to be replaced by a "Havana Central at the West End", part of the "Havana Central" chain of Cuban restaurants, at the same location. The transformation has been greeted with outcry and apprehension from customers and neighborhood residents. The new restaurant opened in late 2006.