Marie's Crisis Café Dive Bar / Gay Bar / Piano Bar

West Village, New York –

Located in the historic building where Thomas Paine wrote “The Crisis Papers” during the Revolutionary War, Marie’s Crisis Café is a mellow hetero-friendly gay piano bar that attracts a mix of entertainment and musical types and patrons who just like to get buzzed and sing show tunes.

A dark cellar at the bottom of some crooked stairs, the simple venue consists of a single room lit by rainbow-colored Christmas lights and featuring a bar backed by an unusual WPA mirror depicting scenes from the French and American Revolutions and the inscription Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité – a revolutionary motto given whole new levels of meaning in this setting.

Marie’s centerpiece, of course, is the piano fitted out with a drink ledge and red leather stools where men in muscle shirts and madras shorts congregate to belt out theater standards between sips of bootleg classics like Georgi and Old Crow.

Less musically inclined guests tend to lay low at the bar to chat with straight newcomers, though a few drinks later even the most tone-deaf patrons will warble along with the off-night Broadway stars and gifted regulars.

In a place where the tunes last all night and new friends last for life, perhaps Marie’s real crisis is that the show must end when dawn breaks and the bleary-eyed but happy crowd must climb the stairs back to the present.