Last Call at Bed-Vyne & Brew

The best way to understand the enchanted 12-year run of of Bed-Vyne & Brew—a small, dearly beloved, soon-to-be departed bar at the intersection of Putnam Avenue and Tompkins Avenue in Bedford Stuyvesant—is its owners had no intention of opening it, but were essentially forced to by a neighborhood that willed it into existence. “We wanted to open a craft beer store, we were just going to get a retail license,” operator and beer/wine purchaser Michael Brooks (who owns the bar with his partners Peter Medford, Rotimi Akinnuoye, and Ayo Akinnuoye) told me on a Tuesday afternoon over the phone. “We were doing construction, and had the door open during the day, and more and more people kept coming in saying the same thing independently, that what they really wanted was a place to drink. So we heard it enough and eventually said, ‘OK, let’s give the community what it wants.’”

For over a decade, Bed-Vyne has been the kind of bar you move to New York City to hang out at. It serves as a hub for an extremely unique, quaint commercial district, a mixed-use area of low-density, pre-war brick and brownstone apartment buildings, giving the area a sense of history you can feel as you pass through it. It’s an area blessedly free of eyesore steel-and-glass new constructions in a tony section of Bed-Stuy that has taken on the name “Black Girl Magic Street” because of the preponderance of small, independently owned businesses run by women of color. Jaime Woods is a singer who loved Bed-Vyne so much she once took a six-month sublet across the street so she could spend more time at the bar. “I appreciate how Black [Bed-Vyne] was. I appreciate the neighborhood that it was in. It felt safe enough to be outside at night as a Black woman by herself,” Woods remembered.

It is an odd construction, built into the ground floor of a distressed residential building. The space is long, thin, and multi-chambered (once three distinct commercial spaces that have since been combined), with a ceiling so low Mitchell Robinson couldn’t stand up straight with Timbs on. “We have a narrow space that’s dark. So we decided to make this an extension of someone’s living room,” Brooks told me, and with its wood plank-lined walls and exposed brick, that is often the sensation you get hanging out at Bed-Vyne, that you’re at an eccentric friend’s house party, hosted in a lodge upstate.

This notion is both affirmed and disabused by the bar’s most distinctive feature, a raised wooden patio out front that covers the square footage from the building up to the property line of the recessed space. Long before Time Again built a Dimes Square brand around a corner bar with a crowd that spills into traffic, Bed-Vyne was a spot made for drinking outside in warm weather. You’d hang out and watch dirtbike and ATV gangs swarm Tesla trucks from the sidewalk, feeling both of the city and slightly removed from it on a porch with music blasting from inside the bar, cutting through the white noise of restaurants and car stereos and life around it.

The bar has always drawn a sophisticated crowd with its curated, rotating selection of craft beers available on draught and in cans, as well as reasonably priced cocktails and wines by the glass. As a longtime Flatbush resident, I don’t get there as much as I’d like—as perhaps part of its charm was its semi-remote location, several blocks from any major, multi-lane avenues and subway stops in its corner of Brooklyn, a residential moat largely keeping social media hypebeast types away—but I returned several weeks ago with a group of friends following a Knicks win.

I was instantly reminded of why Bed-Vyne is so special. With all due respect to its menu and design, it is the diversity, the authentic expression of its neighborhood that it attracts. There were beautiful Indian women in halter tops with bubble ponies, Spanish dudes in Premier League jerseys, and heavily tattooed white guys. But the evening I was there was a reflection of what Bed-Vyne has always been, like its owners and staff and customers: it’s a predominantly Black space. “Our bar is an inclusive place, so no matter what your background is you can come here and have a drink and be comfortable. Everyone talks to each other,” Brooks said, and that was true the night I was hanging out. It was breathable inside—with bartenders working at their own pace but no one waiting too long—and crowded on the patio, as it often is. As M.O.P. and Kendrick Lamar and, of course, Life After Death and loud, drunken, laughter-filled debates about Nikola Jokic’s defensive acumen carried on the air, mingling with the scent of grilling chicken thighs on what felt like the first day of Summer, I felt like I often do when I’m at Bed-Vyne: that I was lucky to be there, and lucky to have spent the majority of my life in Brooklyn.

Local writer and regular Shamira Ibrahim has similarly fond memories of the bar. “In New York, sometimes you get these lightning in a bottle moments like, ‘Wow, I’m around my friends, I’m around my mixed groups of people from different walks of life in the city. I’m listening to a DJ spinning a great mix, I’m dancing, and I’m holding sangria in my hand, and you can’t tell me I’m not in the best place in the world right now.’ I think Bed-Vyne was really good for creating that kind of moment at 2:30 AM, more so than the current primary mode of socializing, which feels like a lot of sections and hookah,” Ibrahim reflected. “Bed-Vyne represents an era of New York that is increasingly disappearing.”

On May 31st, Bed-Vyne & Brew joins a tragic Brooklyn tradition. It will be yet another Black space forcibly closed by the NYPD. According to Brooks, the trouble began last year—following a decade of community partnership between the small business and the 79th precinct—when a new commanding officer came to power and began targeting the bar, displaying arrogant, paternal condescension towards their jurisdiction. “It became clear that they were bad faith actors not interested in being partners with us. Their attitude and their actions were tyrannical. They came from the outside community, but they know what’s best for the community,” Brooks described it. “These guys come in and say that we’re a threat to public safety. The same public that they barely ever interact with.”

Shamira Ibrahim also sees the flawed logic and hypocrisy in this disturbingly familiar approach to community policing. “It’s concerning, the idea is that you’re shutting down businesses to protect the community, but the people who are patrons of the business are not also seen as community. So if a police officer is tasked with protecting the interests of locals, why aren’t the people who regularly patronize these businesses worth protecting? That’s a contradiction of civil enforcement that people consistently run into [that] I don’t have an easy answer for.”

When I ask Brooks to go into detail, how the precinct carried out this campaign of harassment, his voice takes on the familiar tone of anyone who has had to deal with the Kafka-esque nightmare of city bureaucracy erected against you. And I can practically hear his forehead vein throbbing. Brooks outlined how, in the wake of public outrage against the city using draconian MARCH raids against Black-owned businesses like Ode to Babel, they have evolved, using individual city agencies to employ the less newsworthy strategy of death by a thousand fines.

They would come at the peak of service on a Saturday night and claim the bar was overcrowded and had to be shutdown, issuing summons that were summarily thrown out but did collective damage, robbing the business of a full busy night’s revenue and sending a message to patrons that any given evening their party could get shut down. “I think in like a three-month span, we had about 12 different surprise inspections from multiple different agencies. And they’re all anonymous tips, right? But we all know who is doing it,” Brooks said. They’d fine the business for using barricades to keep patrons off the street, barricades that had been issued to them by the 79th precinct for that very purpose. They were fined because the iconic sign above the door of the bar reads “BREW,” rather than Bed-Vyne & Brew, which was judged “misleading.” They were fined for unlabeled beer taps, then the taps were replaced with the names of beers written on them individually, which prompted another fine because the writing was deemed “not large enough.” But the lethal blow was being referred to the State Liquor Authority. “They hit us with like 50 different violations for minor stuff. It was just obvious that they were there on behalf of the precinct to make it not feasible to continue,” Brooks said.

BKMAG reached out to the Deputy Commissioner of Public Information for a statement in response to Brooks’ claims, and we will reprint their response in full:

“In early June of 2024, the 79th Precinct held nightlife meetings with local business owners to discuss the upcoming summer and conditions that may arise. An average Sunday could draw over 10,000 individuals to this six-block area. Shortly thereafter, these concerns became a reality with numerous 911 and 311 calls for overcrowding, excessive noise, public urination, and defecation. Due to community complaints and the hazardous conditions at the location, the NYPD issued three summonses to Bed-Vyne Brew. These were referred to the State Liquor Authority, which also conducted their own investigation. In August, the NYPD held a mediation session with the Mayor’s Office of Media & Entertainment and local politicians. There have been no further incidents or enforcement actions taken by the NYPD since.”

If you read closely, the statement highlights a prevalent philosophy/strategy the NYPD has used against nightlife venues in Black neighborhoods for decades: that the problems of a given area are not due to a failure in policing, but a single small business that provides a venue to congregate and party lawfully. Brooks already addressed those summons, and as for the State Liquor Authority’s role in the closure, he said: “I don’t really want to make this about the SLA because they’re a reactive body, they’re not proactive. So when they get referred from the commanding officer, they’re coming in to bring the hammer down.”

The Bed-Vyne group is now diversified with several other businesses between them, and plans for new ventures still too preliminary to announce—Brooks: “We’re not going nowhere”—which is why, ultimately, Brooks felt he had to walk away from a fight he couldn’t win. “At this point, it’s not worth it for us to go through this level of harassment. We could pay all the fines, and they could come right back and hit us again. I don’t wanna play that game. I don’t want to play that game at all,” Brooks conceded. “Their style is ‘Gotta go speak to the manager’, right? They attack with money, so it’s fined over and over for all these things, and now they can’t afford to be there anymore,” Woods noted.

Ibrahim, a decade-long patron, is willing to say the quiet part loud. “I think there’s a level of honesty people have to have about the fact that the idea of a lot of Black people in a place being excited makes them uncomfortable, and I think that’s hard for people to contend with without admitting biases.” She sees the plight of Bed-Vyne on a sociological level that denotes a shift in the approach of people moving to and living in New York. “There’s this new precedent, where people need to feel 100% at ease from the second they leave their apartment til the second they return for the night, and I don’t think that’s the reality of what urban fabric is. Sometimes you do have that great joy, but sometimes you are uncomfortable. Sometimes you make compromises, sometimes you have to deal with the fact that your neighbor wants to throw a house party til 2 a.m., and you might just have to wear your noise-canceling earphones that night. Not making that compromise and trying to make a city into something that it isn’t—the expectation of reasonableness is something that increasingly disappears—and an expectation of peace and comfort for a specific demographic is what is prioritized.”

Twelve years is a badge of honor in New York, a run any hospitality business would be thrilled to have, and Brooks knows this. He has also seen the neighborhood change around his small business and wonders if perhaps now is the right time for Bed-Vyne’s final chapter, even if the timing and circumstances are less than ideal. “It used to be Do or Die Bed-Stuy. Now it’s Rent and Buy Bed-Stuy,” Brooks lamented, but his hope is that beyond Bed-Vyne’s final night of service on May 31st, it will be replaced by establishments that carry its values and its spirit.

“There were times when the businesses in Bed-Stuy were like parasites, right? They were maybe providing some services, but the money was going into a blackhole. It wasn’t being spent here. You can see this [neighborhood] is thriving now because you got people in their own community having their own businesses and also setting an example for young Black youth, to see what can be done, how you can own your own neighborhood. You don’t have to focus on going to work for somebody else, you can actually do this and your community will support you,” Brooks said.

Shamira Ibrahim remains hopeful for the future. “There are still tons of amazing Black spaces around the city, the lack of visibility of them is more class-oriented than anything else.”

Jaime Woods has since moved to New Orleans, but will always remember Bed-Vyne as formative, as defining her time in New York, as will so many others. “It was a place where Black transplants got to meet other folks just like them. It was a place where people could dance and feel free and feel safe. It was a place where people could let their hair down and live in a crazy old city that is hard to live in.”

As for what’s next? “You can’t really crave the past, but I guess you can hope for a more inclusive future for Bed-Stuy. It just doesn’t really seem like it’s moving in that direction.”

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