Metropolitan Bar lies on land from Williamsburg’s conflict-ridden beginnings: a settlement where the Dutch clashed with Native Americans. The former operated as a playground for the rich during much of the city’s history, and the latter became a haven for poor and immigrant communities, especially after the Williamsburg Bridge opened in 1903 and gave access to people who couldn’t afford ferries between the island and outskirts on a daily basis. The bar sits near a historic cross-section between the neighborhood’s north and south regions. They might go to the bar on Montrose or the one off Union Avenue - but many go to Metropolitan Bar, a neighborhood staple since it opened in 2002. Today, LGBTQ people - and especially gay men - go to one of a few bars around the neighborhood to meet others. Metropolitan Bar, much like the rapidly gentrifying area around it, is filled with spirits. The building’s structure is an index of death, not just for the man whose body might still lie somewhere in the basement, but also below, where an old colonial graveyard sits. The plot, a bar where gay men dance and drink until late in the night, sits under an assemblage of apartments where residents complain if the noise gets too loud. The story of 559 Lorimer is, in some ways, emblematic of the change. Today’s pricey Williamsburg has sounded a death knell to decades of affordable housing for immigrant communities - namely Italians, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and a strong Hasidic Jewish presence. “He might still be down there,” Milo said. But it was the story of that fallen customer that still haunted him. The youngest Milo, whose father (also named Gennaro) moved his family to East New York even as the great-grandparents lived above the restaurant, grew up around the bar, helping out and serving a neighborhood of immigrants - mostly Southern Italians like himself, he remembers. But what Milo remembers most is the chill he felt descending the narrow staircase, and the fear of the ghosts who might lurk below. He remembers when his family finished off the last of the massive, 30-year-old barrels in the 1960s, while he was still a child. And so it fell on the shoulders of the Milo family alone to care for the nameless bar that would later become Milo’s restaurant. Furious, the elder Milo Grandfather took out fistfuls of cash from the register and handed them to his partner. A patron had an issue with the family partner, and they quarreled. The name is irrelevant - blood was spilled.
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No living soul knows the name of this bar, but Milo’s aunt swears it was called Bucket of Blood when the subway opened down the street, they might have changed it to the Subway. Milo’s great-grandfather - also named Gennaro Milo - had a business partner in 1927, when they first opened the restaurant bar. Legends are hazy, and the Milo family’s are no different. Gennaro Milo, an Italian-American in Virgi nia whose family owned the building for most of the 1900s, said that he remembers his great-grandfather keeping large casks of wine down there from the Prohibition era. But that was compensated entirely by the sympathetic audience.Small and dimly lit, the basement of Williamsburg’s Metropolitan Bar stores beer and spirits, as it has for much of the last century. For a sauna it's a bit meager, even run down. I've been in only one other gay sauna in Manila named Epitome.
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So, **** for the first night plus ** for the second night = ***
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Pinoys don't like to exercise and that night, that was very clear -) But this time, I found only one guy worth chatting with. When the film was over everyone ran upstairs.
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Inside everyone was attending a movie on big screen. On the other sunday, the streets were jammed and it took me one hour to get there (around 8 pm). Everything in black with red light strips to lead you around. Second floor is the cruising area with showers, rooms and a computer for internet (impractical slow). The main level contains bar, karoake, showers and sauna. The sauna is quite huge, located on two levels. Only after that I could go to the locker room. Show a document with your identity, pay your membership, deposit your shoes in one corner, leaving all your valuables in a plastic bag in a safe in another room and signing for that. Inside, I witnessed a real procedure to get in.
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It's a free standing house, next to a well lit service station.
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Although the start was a bit complicated. I went to this gay sauna twice on a sunday.