Neir’s Tavern is part of a series of tidbits from the chapters of my book Bars, Taverns and Dives New Yorkers Love, published by Rizzoli. You can order it from Powell’s, Amazon, Rizzoli, and Barnes & Noble. Signed prints of all the bars in the book are available here.

Owner Loy Gordon pins the opening of Neir’s Tavern to 1829, when Cadwallader Colden opened The Blue Pump Room, a tavern conveniently located directly across from the main entrance to the enormous Union Course in Queens County, where 70,000 fans could watch the greatest sporting spectacle of the day: horse racing. The track was made of dirt, not grass, a game-changing innovation of the time, and for decades, some of the biggest races in the country were held right there, surrounded by farmland and a few houses. The big North-South race took place at the Union Course for years, with champion horses from the south and the north facing off in a spectacle of national prominence that brought people from all over the States to little old Woodville (as it was then known). Colden nailed the first rule of business: location.

By the 1860s, the track closed and things quieted down. All that racetrack land was sold to developers, and the old tavern found itself across the street from a bunch of modest two-story homes on a quiet intersection a few blocks from the train, which eventually became the Long Island Rail Road. It became the Old Abbey and sold Joseph Eppig’s made-in-Brooklyn beer. In 1898, Louis Neir bought the place and gave it his name. It’s been Neir’s Tavern ever since.

Woodhaven grew and changed over the years, but Neir’s remained, serving the locals till it nearly went under in 2009. “It almost became a bodega,” Gordon says, “But I said ‘That’s not happening. We’re doing something.’” Gordon, a New York Fire Department lieutenant with zero experience in the food and beverage business, bought the place with other investors just before it closed. He wants Neir’s to stay around for another century or two, and he’s working to get it designated a historical landmark with help from fact-diggers like Richard Hourahan of the Queens Historical Society and Ed Wendell, president of the Woodhaven Cultural and Historical Society.

Next up:

Neary’s of Manhattan’s Midtown East, a warm, gracious bastion of easy elegance and old-school charm, and another chapter of my book Bars, Taverns and Dives New Yorkers Love, which you can order right here. Limited-edition signed prints of the bars are available here.