Facing The Reality Of The New East Village

The neighborhood gets less divey:

On a recent Friday at Sophie’s bar in the East Village, owner Bob Corton sat on a corner barstool like any other of the wizened patrons he’s served for more than two decades. He reminisced about 21 years spent inside his decidedly unrefined dive with the customers that became his closest confidants.

Corton, 54, who opened Sophie’s in 1986, and later the nearby Mona’s in 1989, can trace the evolution of the neighborhood as it played out in his rough-hewn saloon: from the early days when the art community thrived in the low-rent district shared with indigent drug users, to the present day where a predominance of swanky lounges has reduced his unmarked hole in the wall to another blip on the grid of nightlife destinations.

But to anyone who spent time at either of the well-worn watering holes — which Corton announced last month would likely shutter due to his ailing health — the bars posses a mythical quality wrought by waves of well-lubricated patrons who found solace inside the shabby spaces. The regulars spin tales of mirth no doubt emboldened by the heavy flow of whiskey and beer, but no less poignant given the setting. Now, for these two muses of the Downtown drinking class, the stories might be the only thing Sophie’s and Mona’s have left to save.

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Jeff, a holdover from the neighborhood’s heyday who still sported long, gray hair from beneath his woolen cap, struck an even more plaintive note about the new East Village.

“We won’t be able to go anywhere. . . . It’s just the last peg of a dying neighborhood,” said the Sophie’s fixture, who’s been coming for “a couple of years, or a couple of hundred” but declined to give his last name. “This place is like a church for drunks.”

The pints still pour amid gossip over the bars’ future, giving regulars a chance to eulogize their hangout with the imminent sale. It’s where barflies named Jimmy Tokens, Johnny Red, Caveman and Degenerate John took up years of residency on the tattered barstools, earning renown for their eccentric character traits.

Caveman, described as a large, brutish man with full beard, famously slugged pitchers of beer at a time — drinking directly from the source instead of a glass. Degenerate John, a postman who had a history of back injuries, regularly extended his own brand of chivalry by greeting all women patrons with the offer to “sit on my face.”