Two weeks from now, the decorative green shamrock cutouts will be gone from Boxers, a bar and restaurant in the West Village. Also gone will be the glass ashtrays, and a small but significant sign posted above the cash register, reading "Smoking Permitted

At midnight, when March 29 slips into March 30, New York bargoers will have to find something else to do with the hand that is not wrapped around a Guinness, gimlet or gin and tonic. As of that moment, it will be illegal to smoke inside almost all New York City workplaces, including indoor restaurants and bars. There are, certainly, supporters of the smoking ban, among them reformed smokers who find cigarettes either disgusting or too tempting, nonsmokers who loathe smelling otherwise after a night on the town, and waitresses who pass through dense gray clouds on their way to the kitchen. But to many patrons at beer-drenched sports bars, neighborhood pubs and velvet-roped cocktail lounges, the smoky bar is nothing less than a mainstay of city life. In all corners of all five boroughs, there are those — among them boisterous baseball fans, overworked secretaries and tormented artists — who argue that a bar without smoke is hardly a bar at all. "There's sort of a romance to coming into a bar like this with a classic English-Irish feel to it — the smoke, the beer," said Scott Domann, 23, who sat at the bar at Boxers yesterday with a pack of Canadian du Maurier cigarettes and two friends. "It makes sense in California," one of the friends, Matt Bailey, 30, said of the prohibition on smoking in bars. "It just doesn't make sense in New York." There are even nonsmokers, Mr. Bailey said, who like the idea of a smoky bar. The third friend, a nonsmoker named Ian McLaine, 32, half agreed, saying that what he would gain in odor-free clothing, he would lose in atmosphere. "It will change the bar experience, for sure," he said. Cigarettes are also part of the experience at the Hide a Way Cocktail Lounge at Broadway near 147th Street, in Hamilton Heights. "I just never thought it would come this far," said Lisa R. Gresham, a waitress who lives across the street from the lounge and went there yesterday evening to shed the stress of a day's work with cognac and Newports. "This is never going to happen in New York," Ms. Gresham said she had thought. "People are very open; they're who they want to be, and New York caters to that," Ms. Gresham, 32, explained. "If people can't come into a bar to have a cigarette and relax and chill out and just be who they want to be, it's taking away some of the character of New York." A few bar stools down, Glover La'Gressom, 82, a retired buyer in the food and beverage industry who wore a trench coat over his three-piece suit, savored a Beck's with ice and a cigar, as he has done from time to time for the past 60 years. "I'm 82 years old and I've been smoking cigars my whole life," Mr. La'Gressom said, lifting his beer from the bright yellow counter. "I sit here, have a few drinks and reminisce, talk current events," he said. "If I'm not here I'm at another place, and I'm enjoying my cigar." Where, he wondered, would smokers go — out in the streets? "You stand on a street corner, the police are going to chase you, `What are you doing on a street corner?' " he said, shaking his head. That is not the only problem patrons and bar owners are anticipating. Clubs that charge a cover or check patrons for security purposes will have to deal with the comings and goings of patrons seeking smoke breaks. And residents in places like Chelsea, some of whom already complain about noisy nightclubs, are bracing themselves for even more noise, as smokers shiver in the cold on the sidewalks, chatting on cellphones and singing loudly, and engaging in other kinds of rowdy behavior that go along with drinking. Yesterday, bartenders and managers said they figured there was not much they could do about the law, which allows specially ventilated smoking rooms that employees are not supposed to enter. Installing them is expensive, and in three years smoking will no longer be permitted in them. Bars that considered clever schemes to circumvent the law, like charging patrons a $1 cover charge and calling themselves private clubs, seem to have given up. (Private clubs that have employees are not exempt.) Many workers said they dreaded the moment when they would have to ask patrons to light up elsewhere. "It'll be tough to tell 'em to stop smoking," said Mary Murphy, 23, a bartender at the Blarney Stone on Ninth Avenue in Midtown, a favorite of off-duty postal workers. The law does allow restaurants with outdoor space to set aside a quarter of that space for smokers. But at the White Horse Tavern, which normally sets up about 30 or so tables on Hudson Street when the weather turns warm, it is not clear whether there will be such a smoking section — not because demand is lacking, said Fran DeMastri, 52, a manager and bartender, but because it would likely be too great. What if one group is laughing and talking over beer and cigarettes for an hour, as one might expect to do at a bar, while another group is kept waiting for an hour for a coveted smoking table? Things could get sticky, especially if those who are waiting are waiting indoors, where they cannot relax with a cigarette. "I can't picture serious conversations going on without a cloud of smoke over them, without a cigarette in somebody's hand, and an ashtray," Mr. DeMastri said. "The general flavor, I think, is going to change." At least for now, the tavern management plans to remove the ashtrays, Mr. DeMastri said, and post no-smoking signs. Perhaps, he said, someone will add another restriction to a chalk sign in the window, explaining the tavern's policy of no in-line skates, no pets, no bicycles, no bare feet . "There's a good chance that could happen," he said. "One more `no'? Yeah."

<< Prev	CIGoutlet.NET News Home	Next >>