"Once upon a time in Hell's Kitchen there was a watering hole the size of a family mausoleum, stuffed inside the 1/9 downtown subway at 50th and Broadway. Just before the turnstiles, the space's single beacon was a red lightbulb casting a faint glow on yesterday's news: The bar's windows were covered in folds of black-and-white tabloids like a permanent work under construction."
"This was Siberia, a Gotham dive-bar legend. Its master of ceremonies - or as he now calls himself, the "minister of propaganda" - was Tracy Westmoreland. His bar grew to become a dusk-till-dawn defibrillator station, a cheapo hardcore affair where rumbling train rails converged with those other ones: patrons going over their 2 a.m. lines in the loo, then wandering to newsrooms and city jobs, design studios, and Upper East brownstones."
Siberia operated as a subterranean Hell's Kitchen dive bar, centered at 50th and Broadway inside the 1/9 downtown subway, with black-and-white tabloid-covered windows and a red lightbulb over the entrance. Tracy Westmoreland served as the bar's long-time proprietor, cultivating a dusk-to-dawn hardcore scene that attracted journalists, designers, city workers, and celebrities such as Anthony Bourdain and Jimmy Fallon. The bar originally opened in 1996, closed in 2001, then relocated to a basement at 40th and Ninth where its atmosphere intensified. Siberia recently reopened for a third incarnation 40 steps down at the Columbus Circle Station at 57th and Eighth.
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