High Rent Forces Another NYC Gay Bar to Shutter

Greenwich Village mainstay Boots & Saddle is closing down amid rising rent, but will hopefully reopen in a new location.

“I’m sad,” Rob Ziegler, the managing owner of Boots & Saddle, told DNAInfo. “I’ve been here 15 years.” Ziegler started at Boots & Saddle as a bartender in 1999.

The bar is being forced to close after a new owner of the building raised the rent by thousands. Ziegler and the founder of Boots & Saddle, Ron Silver, have been looking throughout the city for a new place to reopen; they hope to find a place with more room.

“On the weekends, it gets so packed in here, you actually have to turn people away,” Danny Garcia, a bartender, said. “It’s ridiculous. It’s bad for business.”

Ziegler and Silver hope to serve food and become a similar venue to Lips, a dinner-club/drag bar. No final closing date for the Christopher Street location has been announced.