Hank's Saloon

For more than 100 years the bar went through names and owners in Boerum Hill: a working-class Irish bar, a Prohibition-era speakeasy, the de facto headquarters of a barmaids union, then Dotty and Ray Slattery's Doray Tavern¹. In 2000 Dave Sheeran took over, painted red hot-rod flames on the outside and renamed it Hank's, after a favorite country singer^{1, 2}.

It quickly became a hub for punk, rock and honky-tonk musicians, and in 2009 we called it a country music haven, drawing crowds for live-band karaoke every other Monday¹. As Grand Victory, Acheron, Don Pedro's and Bar Matchless closed, Hank's became one of the few hard-rock stages left in Brooklyn³.

The building had a busy career of its own. In 2007 the owners wanted to stack a seven-story condo building on top of the bar, until the community board panned the plan⁴. In 2011 the bar was days from a foreclosure auction when a judge stopped it, and a new owner bought it and two nearby buildings a year later⁴.

In November 2017 the proprietor, Julie Ipcar, posted the news: "the developer is ready to build, plans will be filed, and Hank's Saloon will have to close at the end of next year"⁴. It closed on New Year's Eve 2018, the same night as Continental Bar, Cornelia Street Cafe, Cielo and Output^{1, 3}. Hank's moved into a second-floor nook of Hill Country Food Park on Adams Street, lasted five months, and closed again on June 14, 2019⁵.

Now it lives on film: Leon Chase's documentary about the bar sold out its premiere at the Nitehawk Cinema in Windsor Terrace in January 2026, and in April Freddy's Bar in South Park Slope sold out a screening of its own^{1, 2}.