What a Drag

By Stephen McKinley

The tough anti-smoking law planned for New York City by Mayor Michael Bloomberg would have a particularly serious impact on bars and restaurants in Irish neighborhoods close to the city borders, according to patrons and bar owners.

In Bayside in Queens and Woodlawn in the Bronx, both a short distance from the city limits, a smoking ban would mean patrons who smoke could walk outside the city where they could continue to enjoy a cigarette with their drinks.

“Woodlawn is a very graphic example of how this law would immediately affect people,” said Jack Cooke, president of the United Restaurant and Liquor Dealers of Manhattan. “There are parts of McLean Avenue where the yellow line is the border, and on one side of the street the bars are in the Bronx and on the other side they are in Westchester.”

Bar owners in Woodlawn expressed dismay at the proposed ban, and said that business would be lost to the bars just across the border. Patrons in Woodlawn in the Bronx last weekend confirmed these fears. While no one disagreed that smoking was an unhealthy habit, they asserted that it should still be something that people could do in bars if they wanted.

“I’d drink in Yonkers, yes,” said Shane Grace from Tipperary, relaxing in J.P. Clarke’s on McLean Avenue. Clarke’s bar is on the Westchester side of a triangular block through which the border runs.

Grace and two friends, Denise Kennedy and John Ryan, also from Tipperary, were enjoying a cigarette with their drinks, and explained that a typical night out on the weekend for them would mean visiting some of the bars on Katonah Avenue in Woodlawn, then walking the short distance to other Irish bars on McLean Avenue in Westchester.

“The only time I ever really smoke is when I go out for a drink,” said Kennedy. “I would have a cigarette to relax with a drink.”

Asked would she continue to drink in Katonah Avenue bars if smoking was banned in the city, she said: “Definitely not. The whole thing about going to pubs is to enjoy a cigarette with your drink.”

“It doesn’t bother me too much,” said Ryan, “I’m trying to go off the fags anyway.”

“But it will be really bad for business,” added Grace, who, like many other smokers, buys his cigarettes in Westchester, where, since Mayor Bloomberg increased New York City tax on tobacco, a pack of cigarettes is as much as $3.15 cheaper.

“It will make an uncomfortable atmosphere if you have to go outside for a cigarette,” Grace continued. “Especially in winter.”

In Ned Devine’s bar, also in Westchester, a non-smoking patron expressed anger at the proposed ban.

“It’s like walking into a pub and being told you can’t have a pint,” he said, requesting that his name not be used. “Would I set foot in a non-smoking bar? Absolutely not, and I don’t even smoke. Bloomberg is only out for the rich,” he said.

Five minutes from Devine’s, the owner of Behan’s Bar on Katonah Avenue, John Creegan, said that the proposed ban would be a disaster for business.

“We’re only three or four blocks from the border,” he said. “People are not going to go into a bar if they can’t have a cigarette. I should hope it doesn’t happen.”

Creegan, originally from County Leitrim, attacked the mayor’s claim that the ban would benefit the health of bar and wait staff. “Many of them smoke anyway,” he said.

One bar owner on the Westchester side of the border who declined to be named, said that, inevitably, a state-wide ban on smoking would follow any successful city ban, and that the prosperity to bars and restaurants just outside the city border would be short-lived.

In Behan’s bar, one bar man who said his name was Connor, and a non-smoker, said he foresaw trouble with patrons if they could not smoke.

“There will be aggro,” he said, using a term for aggression. One customer at Behan’s disagreed with the general feeling that the ban would be bad for business.

“It won’t bother me,” he said, dragging on a Marlboro. “I’d just go outside. If you can go on a plane to Ireland for five hours and not smoke, then you can go from here to that door,” he said, indicating the bar’s front door with his head, “and smoke outside. Even in the dead of winter.”

Closer to Westchester than even Behan’s bar, Jimmy K’s Bar and Restaurant was busy with patrons drinking and playing darts. Owner Jimmy Kennedy, who is from Letterkenny, Co. Donegal, has been running the bar for 10 years.

“If I were a smoker, I would go drink in Yonkers [in Westchester],” he said. Kennedy pointed out that his restaurant, which has 50 seats, is separated from the bar by a glass door.

He said that customers were quite happy, under current smoking restrictions, to leave their table and go outside into the bar area, if they wanted a cigarette.

“I would say my business will be hit,” he said. “Cut in half is not an exaggeration. You have a choice of 10 or 15 bars within a quarter of a mile here. You want to smoke? You’re going to go to Westchester.”

A non-smoker himself, Kennedy said the measure proposed by the mayor was “very draconian.”

“People should have a free will to smoke, and the policing of this thing would be very awkward,” he said.

One of Kennedy’s customers, John Murtagh, who is from County Clare, said that Kennedy’s is his local bar, where he likes a game or two of darts with his friends. He reckons that he smokes about 20 cigarettes a day.

“I cannot see myself coming here,” he said, lighting a Marlboro Light. “I would stay up in Yonkers. I was in California — you have to walk out on to the street to have a cigarette.”

At Rory Dolan’s Restaurant on McLean Avenue in Yonkers, doorman Donald Barron, an Irish American, laughed when he was asked about the smoking ban.

An occasional smoker himself, he said he had never seen people smoke as much as the “Irish from Ireland.”

“One woman asked me to take her ashtray away from her, because she said, ‘I don’t want to see how many I’ve smoked,’ ” he said.