Installation view of Sadie Barnette: The New Eagle Creek Saloon, The Kitchen, New York, January 18, 2022–March 6, 2022. Everyone is encouraged to experience the exhibition through touch and sound as a changing audio component elevates the installation. The bar offered a social safe space for marginalized individuals of the multiracial queer community in San Francisco.Īt the installation, visitors can step into this shiny pink bar decorated with glittering books, bar stools, and a glowing “Eagle Creek” neon sign. The original saloon was first opened and operated from 1990–1993 by the artist’s father, Rodney Barnette, founder of the Compton Black Panther Party chapter. Produced in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem, the installation makes way for the East Coast’s first “institutional presentation” of this historical space. The staff comes from Harlem, the Bronx, sometimes Brooklyn (we even had bartenders from New Jersey) and it’s safe heaven for the mostly black queer community uptown and it’s relatively close to home.”Ģ376 Adam Clayton Powell Jr Blvd.NYC’s newest saloon comes just in time for Black History Month and soon after the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Uprising.Ĭelebrate Queer Black history at The Kitchen in Chelsea from now through March 6th with Sadie Barnette’s reimagination of Eagle Creek Saloon-San Francisco’s first Black-owned gay bar. “It’s a neighborhood bar where everyone knows your name and that has an identity very much like the community that it serves. “In my humble opinion, there’s no other place like Alibi Lounge for the queer community in NYC especially in northern Manhattan and its borders,” Minko told Paper Magazine.
According to the GoFundMe page, it took two assaults on the community safe space before NYPD made an arrest. A vandal set fire to Alibi’s rainbow flags on two occasions during Pride Month in 2019. The coronavirus pandemic isn’t the first hardship to hit Alibi in recent years. Contributions will go towards helping him “keep my black/latino LGBTQ employees on payroll, pay rent, taxes, and utilities covering the months we quarantined.” He’s already raised $26,000 of the club’s $50,00 goal as of Tuesday, June 9. Minko is now fighting to save the bar with a GoFundMe.
#OW BAR GAY BAR NYC SERIES#
Minko only reopened for takeout in mid-May, for two days a week and now has series of required payments. Alibi did not receive any pandemic assistance from the government and to make matter worse, burglars broke into the bar and stole its cash register while the business was closed for the pandemic. Alibi was forced to shut its doors on March 16 to adhere to NYC’s COVID-related restrictions and has continued to face financial challenges.
Owner Alexi Minko opened Alibi Lounge in 2015, a decade after immigrating to New York from Gabon, with the hopes of creating a safe heaven for the LGBTQ community of Harlem. As we enter Pride Month 2020, in the midst of a global fight for racial equality, Manhattan’s only black-owned LGBTQ+ bar, is in danger of shutting its door for good.