In New York City, keeping tabs on the bars and restaurants that close is something akin to an endurance sport. Blink and you’ll miss the last night at one or the next. Some closures come with fanfare, like the looming shuttering of Donohue’s Steak House, a 76-year-old institution on Manhattan’s Upper East Side that’s everything you imagine a 1950s-era chop house might look like. (Dark-wood panelled walls; a menu of broiled fish, steak, baked meatloaf, and broiled fish on a chalkboard; a checkerboard-pattern floor; disorienting Renaissance-style font on all signage, etc.) Strangers still strike up conversation with strangers. A New York Times article — an obituary, of sorts — referred to it as “a museum of what bars used to be”.

That phrase is perfect. Most major American cities have a landmarks commission of one sort or another. New York’s is pretty strict. You can hardly change a doorknob on a historic building without getting approval first. I know that growth and evolution are the nature of a city, and living in one requires that you accommodate change. Often that’s for good. After all, nobody would tolerate a 150-year-old sewer system or a century-old subway system that constantly breaks down...oh, wait. Never mind.

But I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how there are never efforts to preserve a business as you would a historical artifact. In the early 2000s, I lived in South Boston. It’s the area that’s as much a featured character in Good Will Hunting as Matt Damon’s Will Hunting. See also: The Departed, Black Mass, and The Town. In case you need reminding, Southie, as it’s affectionately known, is a historically Irish enclave where it feels like every local has a family member who went to the prom with notorious gangster Whitey Bulger’s sister. I came to that conclusion after years of hanging out in the neighbourhood’s many joints — lowkey places that take cues from old-timey Irish-countryside gathering spots, but are very much an American interpretation of them. They’re far more divey, thanks to a dependable patina of light grime that’s less gross than charming in an odd sort of way. Maybe it’s the remnants of evaporation of the decades of tears shed in the space — tears of joy as well as sadness. To scrub them clean would be to betray the institution’s identity. Tolerating the grit is part of the 
nostalgic fascination.

And then, these watering holes started closing. Trendy Tequila bars and “contemporary American” farm-to-table restaurants opened, one by one. Shiny, boxy condo buildings went up. They tower over the lovingly worn triple-decker homes that remain — places where generations of babies took their first steps and countless holiday dinners were prepared. It felt as if the soul of the neighbourhood vanished. And nobody even held a proper funeral. At least those movies remain as an historical record. But as much as I mourn for each bar — for the people who lose their jobs and the locals who lose their favourite spot to escape their troubles for a minute — what I really grieve is the permanent loss of a style, of a genre of bar that we can never get back. You can’t create a dive. “Dive” is a judgement a customer makes, not a category. You can’t hire the bartender who calls everyone “hon” and tells stories of the circus-sideshow-calibre characters she served when she was a young barmaid and there was a punk club next door where the organic market now stands.

I know, I know — everything changes, nothing gold can stay, the only thing certain in life is death, yadda yadda. But what I love about this species of bar is that while so many people — especially journalists like myself who make a living spotting trends — are always on the lookout for what’s new and cool, old bars and restaurants are escapist retreats that feel designed for looking back, for feeding a nostalgia for the past, even for a time we never knew first hand, but only read or watched movies about. And watching Good Will Hunting is certainly not the same as pulling up a stool at a bar where the jukebox takes coins, the deceased live on in faded photos on the wall, and the bar wears the stains of spilt whisky.