67 Orange Street

Illustration by Daniel Krall

In the eighteen-forties, the original 67 Orange Street, which stood on what is now Baxter Street, in the turbulent slum of Five Points, housed Almack’s Dance Hall. It was one of the first businesses in New York to be owned by an African-American. “His name was Pete Williams, and he had some real entrepreneurial spirit,” Karl Franz Williams, the amicable, dreadlocked owner of this Harlem bar, said. Williams sees his snug bi-level lounge as a speakeasy-style social club. On a recent Wednesday, a local patron admired an abstract psychedelic acrylic painting, “Suppa in Harlem,” that he had just purchased off the bar’s exposed-brick wall, while sipping a Le Grand’s Old-Fashioned (high-rye bourbon, Benedictine, baked-apple bitters). “It’s about life in this hood—you either get it or you don’t.” A table of mirthful young men in blazers and J. Crew boyfriend gingham requested the absinthe fountain, held aloft by a metallic nude figurine, as Parliament’s “Flash Light” pumped from the speakers. A native of Bed-Stuy, who lived there before “Buffy and Jody moved in,” eyed a first-timer who was having her own Harlem supper (lobster-and-shrimp mac and cheese). “Know this song?” he asked. She didn’t, and he recommended that she take another sip of her drink, a cilantro-infused cucumber-vodka cocktail that is known, at 67 Orange Street, as Emancipation Again. ♦