Big cities are living organisms, contracting and expanding every day. And in a competitive place like New York City, it’s cause for celebration when a local business can celebrate five, ten, or twenty years in operation.
Though the Pencil Factory (142 Franklin St.) just barely misses the 25th anniversary milestone, it remains a stalwart local business, a veritable bedrock as the surrounding area fluctuates with new storefronts and new residents.
Unfortunately, as the adage goes, all good things must come to an end. The Pencil Factory will officially shut its doors after this weekend; its last day is July 27.
Louise Favier, Sean O’Rourke, and Brian Taylor opened the bar in 2001, an era when not even the cabs dared to venture into the neighborhood, long before the fancy waterfront high rises and Michelin-starred restaurants moved in. Artists and creative types had been flocking to Williamsburg since the 1990s, drawn by the cheap rent and open industrial spaces that could be easily repurposed into studios and DIY venues. The new influx of people sometimes found themselves in Greenpoint, whether by intention or as a detour from where they had hoped to originally land, Brian Taylor among them.
“I had lived in Manhattan for years, and I got on the L train one day from the Liquor Store Bar, and I said ‘That’s it, I’m gonna move to Brooklyn,’ got off at Bedford, walked into a real estate office, [and said] ‘I wanna live here,’” Taylor recalled. The broker gave him a once-over and said, “‘I’m not thinking Williamsburg is for you,” and took him to see a unit on Milton Street.
Taylor moved in and made attempts at getting friends to join him in Greenpoint, in the pursuit of creating a local watering hole. He recruited friends Louise Favier and Sean O’Rourke to help. Once the “for rent” sign went up outside of 142 Franklin Street, they knew they had found their spot.
Though O’Rourke had built a few bars, none of the trio had experience bartending.
“Hiring the bartenders we did, having single malt scotch—I remember people would say, ‘I’m in Greenpoint?’—that was a big thing for them to see a bar that wasn’t an old man bar, which now I think we are,” Taylor says with a laugh.
The Pencil Factory was known as the Miltonian Social Club before shuttering in the 1960s, back when “the neighborhood had several bars on every block serving the large longshoreman population,” the Village Voice wrote in a 2003 review. They hoped to evoke some of that history and create a laid-back atmosphere, immune to the whims of the trend cycle.
“Our whole feeling was timeless New York, and we wanted the vibe of the 1930s, we wanted to open the door and have it feel like a bar had been sitting there all dusty for a hundred years, and we just dusted off the shelves,” said Louise Favier.
The Pencil Factory officially opened its doors in December 2001 and was an immediate hit.
“It was about six weeks after we signed the lease that 9/11 happened. The sense of loss was so powerful, but I think it made people feel more like they wanted community, they wanted to connect, they wanted to feel that sense of being in the neighborhood and being together at this difficult time,” said Favier. “We opened the doors and people poured in.”
The bar’s location on a busy intersection of Franklin Street and Greenpoint Avenue quickly solidified its position as a prime hangout spot, though the trio recalled that they didn’t add outdoor seating until a couple of years after opening. In the post-pandemic years, the Pencil Factory often hosted food pop-ups, like suya-spiced meats from the bar’s own Chef Kenny, or a recent lobster roll pop-up from Sailor & Siren. The past few years have also seen another local population boom, and with it, something of a vibe shift. The bar started to draw a younger crowd with frequent late-night dance parties on the weekends.
It stunned the community earlier this year when news broke that the bar would be forced to close. The Pencil Factory team revealed that the bar’s landlord, Guy Smilovich, refused to renew their lease. Though they had a fairly amicable relationship with him over the past twenty or so years, they felt like something changed over the past few years. When it came time to renegotiate the lease, Smilovich had increased the rent and tried to insert new terms that Favier called “pretty scary.”
They tried to find a compromise, but it was a take-it-or-leave-it kind of deal. They left it. The space remains on the market for an eye-watering sum of $26,750 a month.
Since they announced the closure in March, rumors about a big chain like Lululemon or Warby Parker taking over have proliferated. A spokesperson confirmed to us that Warby Parker has no plans to open a retail location in the Pencil Factory space (Lululemon has not responded as of press time).
We also reached out to Smilovich, but also have not yet received a comment.
Ultimately, the team expressed a great sense of gratitude over the past 25 years, not only for the customers, but also for the whole Pencil Factory staff, including manager Mike Bishop.
“We absolutely love Greenpoint. It has been the best customers that anyone could ever ask for, the best community to be in, just absolutely fabulous,” Favier concluded.
The bar’s last day on Sunday is sure to be one for the books. Attendees are encouraged to wear any Pencil Factory merch they own.
From the whole Greenpoint community, thank you to the Pencil Factory, for all the good times.
Lululemon or Warby Parker? Disgusting news
Do we really need more sad news?