Another \'90s Fixture of Lower East Side Is Gone

Tony Cenicola/The New York Times Back in the day: the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch adorned the entrance of the Pink Pony in 2004.

Quietly, without fanfare, another onetime fixture of downtown’s East Side has shut its doors. This time it is the Pink Pony, the sprawling, welcoming cafe on Ludlow Street just south of Houston.

Glowingly lighted, lined with a hodgepodge of books and possessing an unsettling nonreversing mirror in one of its restrooms, the Pink Pony opened in the early ’90s alongside the rock bar Max Fish. The bar captured a fast retreating moment in the evolution - some may say devolution - of the Lower East Side, a tie when patrons read those books and flocked for documentary screenings and poetry nights.

The owner, Lucien Bahaj, a Moroccan-born Frenchman who took over the Pink Pony in 2001, said he closed it partly because of his health - he is 68 and diabetic - but primarily because the landlord wanted $20,000 a month in rent, up from the current $14,000. Mr. Bahaj said that while the landlord, Arwen Properties, had been reasonable and patient, and was merely asking for market rent, his cafe had come to seem out of step in a neighborhood sprouting condominium towers, boutique hotels, mixologists and sports bars.

“The main reason for all of this is not the health, and not the business going down; it’s that the neighborhood has changed,” said Mr. Bahaj, who also owns the 15-year-old restaurant Lucien in the East Village. “It’s the ability to carry on when the original clientele has moved elsewhere.”

The Pink Pon! y actually closed its doors for the last time on Jan. 31. Its death was reported Monday by the blog Bowery Boogie.

The shuttering of the Pink Pony is the latest in a series of closings of bars and restaurants that had sprung up in the messier and freer-wheeling ’90s and early aughts, before gentrification fully claimed the East Village and the Lower East Side. In recent years, the Lakeside Lounge and the Life Café, both on Avenue B, Mars Bar on Second Avenue and Banjo Jim’s on Avenue C have all closed.

The Pink Pony originally opened in the early ’90s. When Mr. Bahaj took it over, it became a tenant of Max Fish, which itself almost closed in 2011. But after Max Fish renegotiated its leae that year, Mr. Bahaj said he became a direct tenant of Arwen Properties. Reached by phone, a representative for the landlord said it had no comment.

Mr. Bahaj said he held on for as long as he could - “I resisted because of pride and because of connection to the community” - but then concluded that trying to stay open made little business sense.