IN THE MAGAZINE

PLEASE SNORT ME - PART 1

An Oral History of Brooklyn's Most Notorious Bar

Why hello there, sonny. You too, little miss. So you’re the young whippersnappers that’re living in good old Williamsburg, Brooklyn, now, huh? Well let me tell you kids, I may not look like much more than an old fogey now, but I was here in the WB back when the likes of you were sucking on your mammy’s teat. Why, I was there at the first Fischerspooner show. I have a copy of Andrew WK’s home-recorded demos—he gave them to me himself. We used to sit around and spin yarns at the Stinger Club on Grand Street all night long, and then Peaches and Larry Tee would come in trailing Adult. records, Nike Dunks in black and yellow, and steaming fresh copies of index magazine. After that we’d go over to P.S.1 on Saturdays and listen to Chicks on Speed play a show while we all tried to recover from the night before at Kokie’s…

Wait, “What’s Kokie’s,” you said? These old ears ain’t what they used to be but I could swear you just asked me that. You did! Well sit down here on this stack of back issues of Purple, and let me tell you about a time long past… a hazy era known as 1999…

Just before the turn of the millennium, on the soon-to-be gentrified corner of Berry and North 3rd in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, there was a bar called Kokie’s Place. It was the stuff of legend. Or, to put it more bluntly, it was a dingy Puerto Rican coke bar. But really, it was so much more! 1999-2001 was a pivotal era in Williamsburg history—it’s when the neighborhood finally went from kind of depressing because it wasn’t Manhattan to really depressing because it’s full of assholes fresh out of art school—and Kokie’s was at the center of that transformation.

So this is a tale of gentrification. It’s a tale of people from different cultures coming together in really weird ways. And of course, it’s a tale of wrecking your life and wasting your 20s doing tons of the worst cocaine that a Spanish-speaking New York drug dealer has ever stepped on.

We’ve compiled a history of Kokie’s, straight from the mouths of the locals, the regulars, and the people whose lives were touched and/or destroyed by this very special place… a coke bar called Kokie’s.


ANCIENT HISTORY

JEFF JENSEN: I first noticed the Kokie’s sign in 1991. It wasn’t open to the public at the time but we knew there were people doing coke inside. You have no idea how blown-out and desolate the neighborhood was back then. The token booth dude at the Bedford stop of the L train was narcoleptic and you could just push the crappy old wooden turnstiles open. No one cared. I tried to wake him up once to pay for my ride and people laughed at me.

TOM C: In the early 90s, the cops called South 2nd Street between Berry and Bedford, right around the corner from Kokie’s, “The Drugs and Death Corridor.” You could buy drugs right out on the street. It was all Puerto Rican and they loved to beat-up white guys. I got jumped at least three times.

GARY J: The Southside was no joke. And those Kokie’s guys were not the kind of people you’d want as friends or enemies. They were all criminals, in and out of prison.

JEFF JENSEN: So it took real balls for me to finally knock on the door in 1995. I convinced the doorman to let me in. I said, “I want to become a member of this club.” He wouldn’t let me in at first but I know how to hustle. Plus I had a pretty serious cocaine habit at the time. At first I would just buy coke from them and leave, but then I started hanging out with the Overlords guys. There was a biker bar called Road Sores on South 6th street. This gang called the Overlords would always hang out there or at Kokie’s. I became really good friends with one of them, a Puerto Rican biker who changed his name to Muskrat after his wife died in a chain fight. They had both really loved the song “Muskrat Love.” I used to do immense quantities of cocaine off the end of Muskrat’s knife. He would just dip it into a Folgers can full of coke right there in Kokie’s.

GARY J: If you want a little bit of history, the landlord told me that the bar started off in the early 1900s as an Italian social club. Then in the 50s it got taken over by a Puerto Rican gentleman and he turned it into a Spanish social club—they had cockfighting and gambling there. That went on for about 20 years and then he passed it on to his godson or someone like that. The bar wasn’t making any money because its clientele was all old-timers paying something like a dollar for a beer. So the godson had the bright idea to turn it into a coke den.

BRIAN F: Word spread fast. Everyone heard about Kokie’s the same way: “Hey, have you been to Kokie’s? It’s a COKE bar called KOKIE’S!”

GARY J: Oh, by the way, the name of the bar comes from a little green tree frog from Puerto Rico called a Coqui (pronounced “Kokie”). It’s called that because when it chirps it makes a sound like, “Ko-kee! Ko-kee!” That’s where the name comes from, not from cocaine.


TO BE CONTINUED
PLEASE SNORT ME | 1 | 2 | 3 |


Do you have a fond Kokie's memory of your own? Please do tell us in the comments section below.

Comments

Anonymous, on Apr 26, 2009 wrote: Man, we were just talking about Kokie’s and how much we missed it. I remember a New Year’s eve I spent there. Maybe 98 or 99. The weirdest scene I’ve ever seen. Super bright lights, Puerto Ricans, Hasidic Jews, and us. And as much terrible coke as you could handle. It was the best New Year’s I’ve had in NYC. There was another similar place in Bushwick until a few years ago. (I’m not saying the name.) Seems like that’s gone too. There’s no real sleaze left in the city.

Anonymous, on Apr 21, 2009 wrote: Nothing much to add, but I enjoyed spending that "quality time" with 1 or 2 wonderful older Puerto Rican ladies in the booths the few times I was there. They were almost maternal as we took turns with the keys.

Anonymous, on Apr 20, 2009 wrote: i still buy my coke on berry and hang out at levee all night.

Anonymous, on Mar 20, 2009 wrote: I was

Anonymous, on Mar 1, 2009 wrote: Kokies as the shit....and the coke was shitty, but it was always better than nothing. PLus they had ice cold Heinekins. The biker club on South 6th was the Road Tramps, not the Road Sores. I lived next door and they beat up my roomate for peing on the street.