A Hazy Haven (Hack, Hack) of Legal Smoking
Posted on April 20, 2009 by Lois DeSocio in Offbeat, Travel
By Lois DeSocio
When people hang out at Hudson Bar and Books in Manhattan, they’re not flipping pages—they’re flicking ashes. It’s a place where the non-smokers are milling around outside the front door as they decide if a face-full of tobacco smoke is worth a step inside a place where smokers rule.
“Is this legal?” a passerby yells from the street outside the front door of this Greenwich Village cigar bar on a recent Saturday evening.
Six years after Mayor Bloomberg’s statewide anti-smoking law took effect, the patrons of Hudson Bar and Books puff away in a perpetual haze of toxic smoke. It’s one of a handful of cigar bars left in Manhattan under a “grandfather” clause that protected cigar bars that opened before December 31, 2001.
