FREDDY’S SCREENING TONIGHT

Some hipsters at Freddy’s in 1952

In a perfect world, Freddy’s Bar & Backroom would never have gotten any attention from the media. The beer-soaked dive had occupied the same corner of Prospect Heights since prohibition, transforming from a speakeasy to a neighborhood bowling alley to a hangout for alcoholic cops and Daily News reporters to a hub for prostitution to your run-of-the-mill white kids bar. It was the kind of place that had the same bartender for 30 years, an old drunk named “Seat Covers” who lived above the bar until the day he died. In Freddy’s later years, when I went there occasionally with my underage friends to get trashed on cheap whiskey, there was a TV set hanging from the ceiling playing loops of soft-core porn and video art and weird posters on the walls you could barely make out in the dimness. By that time, going to Freddy’s meant you had the chance to see a vaudevillian array of live acts: bluegrass one night, improv the next, a wannabe opera singer the night after that—I heard Blue Oyster Cult played a show here once, which I suspect is a lie, but I’m far more willing to suspend my disbelief for Freddy’s than anywhere else.

The bar didn’t become famous outside the wet-brained set until a few years ago, when it found itself in the “footprint” of Atlantic Yards, a $4.9 billion mixed-use development boondoggle that has been the subject of hundreds of protests, counter-protests, speeches, press releases, and editorials over the past half decade. Atlantic Yards’ opponents objected to the size of the high-rise towers, the shady dealings of Yards mastermind Bruce Ratner (for instance, he paid politicians to give him tax cuts and sell him government-owned land for cheap), the overcrowding that all the new apartments and condos would bring, and even the name of the new NBA arena that’s part of the project (it’ll be called Barclays Center, after the bank that was founded by slave traders and did business with the Nazis and Apartheid-era South Africa).

Freddy’s became a natural meeting place for the anti-Yards crowd, who used the bar to study labyrinthine legal documents about eminent domain, fantasize about doing horrible things to Ratner, and stage elaborately costumed protests. As it became increasingly obvious that Atlantic Yards—now bankrolled partly by the shady Russian billionaire who owned the New Jersey Nets—were going to be built, however they started using Freddy’s for its intended purpose and just brooded and drank and counted the days until the wrecking ball came.

Construction on Atlantic Yards began in March, and Freddy’s finally accepted a buyout offer from Ratner and closed a little over a month ago. But filmmaker Vicente Ortega is keeping Freddy’s memory alive through his debut documentary feature, the appropriately-titled Freddy’s. It screens on Wednesday and Friday nights at the Brooklyn Film Festival, and after the screenings will be a Q&A with the staff of Freddy’s. There’s no word yet on where the after party will be. Click here for more info.

HARRY CHEADLE

Freddy’s Premiere
June 9th – 7 PM
Brooklyn Heights Cinema

June 11th – 6 PM
indieScreen