People’s Is an Arty Cocktail Bar for the Locals
In New York — a city with endless places to grab a drink — it can be remarkably hard to find the right place to grab a drink.
“‘Where shall we go’ should not be such a hard question to answer at the end of a really nice dinner in a city like New York,” says Margot Hauer-King. “For whatever reason there suddenly was this gap of an answer to that question.”
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To fill that gap, Hauer-King and Emmet McDermott have opened People’s, a cocktail lounge and art space set within a historic Greenwich Village townhouse.
“You hit your late 20s and all of a sudden those dive bars and random nightclubs downtown kind of lose their appeal,” says McDermott. “My feeling was that New York coming out of the pandemic had lost those really fun, boutique, downtown velvet-rope experiences in the vein of Bungalow 8 or Beatrice,” he adds. “Now that New Yorkers are ready to go out again, there is that need to have a place to pop into; a local place where the staff knows you, it’s intimate, it’s small, it’s special — and it’s really, really fun.”
Officially open to the public this week, People’s pushes back against the membership model that has grown popular in recent years, with reservations available by referral. In addition to a soft opening for friends and family, the space hosted a private birthday party for Ivy Getty last weekend.
“Everyone that walked in last week felt like they were really rooting for us and the staff and for the experience, which made it feel really special,” says Hauer-King, adding that the People’s vision was driven by community-building. “Watching every table know each other and spot each other across the room was definitely a highlight of the week.”
People’s has been two years in the making, but McDermott and Hauer-King linked up on the project around a year ago. “We were set up on a date actually, which is how we met,” says Hauer-King. “The friend that set us up, we joked that we may not have ended up together romantically, but arguably this is the most successful setup he’s done to date.”
While McDermott has a background in film and works primarily as a film producer, Hauer-King has spent most of her career in luxury branding and marketing, but grew up working in and surrounded by the hospitality world as the daughter of London restaurateur Jeremy King. It was King who prompted the pair to take a chance on the historical but dilapidated space at 113 West 13th Street.
“When we found it, it felt like the rotted insides of a pirate ship,” says McDermott of the space, which had deteriorated in recent years. “Every other restaurateur that looked at it was like, ‘absolutely not. This is a nightmare.’ And we were too naive to really know what we were up against. But there was a magic to the space,” McDermott adds. “So we rolled up our sleeves and did it. And it really wasn’t until we started meeting neighbors, when we were going for our liquor license, where an old neighbor who’d been living there for decades was like, ‘you know, this place used to be a really famous gallery a hundred years ago.’”
People’s inhabits what was once the Downtown Gallery, an early champion of American modernism founded in 1926 by gallerist Edith Halpert and supported by Abby Rockefeller, who went on to found MoMA several years later.
“Edith Halpert and this space carry within the art community so much importance still; she was the first commercial gallery to exclusively show living American artists when the rest of the art market was sort of falling over dead white Europeans,” Hauer-King adds. “She was also one of the first galleries to be downtown. Artists lived downtown and collectors lived uptown, and she sort of said, ‘let’s bring this world all together in this space.'”
With the building’s history in mind, the pair introduced an art concept to People’s. They will exhibit contemporary artists within their Gallery space, which features an original 1920s skylight and was originally built by Rockefeller to house sculpture. The works on display today will rotate seasonally, and are available to purchase.
“One of the major questions we had is, will artists in galleries be happy to put art on consignment in a living, breathing bar where people are drinking and having fun?” says Hauer-King. The answer was a resounding “yes.”
People’s is composed of three distinct rooms, including the back Gallery, an intimate Parlor and lively Salon. The food program is led by the Elizabeth Street Hospitality team, who are behind beloved downtown dining spots like Raf’s and the Michelin-starred Musket Room. With community in mind, everything on the menu was designed to be shared among guests, from seasonal “toasties” to a burger. The beverage program is led by a curated selection of cocktails and thoughtful martinis, with an emphasis on Champagne — the sound of cork popping was an early brand inspiration for People’s.
“Because it takes you somewhere,” says Hauer-King. “And Champagne does a lot of hard work to get you there. You can be sitting on a gross rainy day like this, with the power going out, and if someone opens a bottle of Champagne, everyone is suddenly going to look at each other and be like, there’s nowhere I’d rather be.”
The People’s team is rounded out by founding partner Frankie Carattini and general manager Cassandra Gann, formerly of The Nines.
“Our people are the most important part of this experience,” adds Hauer-King. “It makes it feel like People’s is for everyone, and belonging to everyone. And I think that in a city where you can pretty much buy anything within a couple of blocks, that’s one thing you really can’t buy: belonging. The world we live in today, we need that more than ever.”
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