After more than 50 years in business as an LGBT bar, The Westbury is officially closed.
The business, at 261 S. 13th St., announced on social media late last week that it would not be reopening its doors. The building in which The Westbury is housed has been closed for the past month, after a fire at the adjoining Parker-Spruce Hotel and successive L&I violations.
PGN reported last week that the hotel lessee, The Wankawala Organization, was scheduled to purchase the building Nov. 17 and reportedly plans to keep it closed until it can be rehabbed.
Organization officials did not return requests for comment, so it is unclear if the sale went through.
The Westbury owner Chuck Brault declined to comment for this story.
A Facebook post last Friday on The Westbury’s page noted that the bar undertook “extensive efforts trying to get an exception from the city,” to no avail.
“After 30 years in our current location, and many years at the 15th Street location, The Westbury has given our all to serve the community with a friendly oasis from the rigors of life,” the post stated. “I hope we will be remembered fondly.”
The Westbury began as Westbury Grill in the 1940s, the hotel bar of the Westbury Hotel at 15th and Spruce streets. That hotel has since been converted to apartments.
The venue later changed its name to Westbury Bar and began advertising as a gay bar in LGBT publications in the early 1960s.
“It was kind of a musical bar in the ’50s, they had a lot of entertainment there,” said local LGBT historian Bob Skiba. “And then by the ’60s it had turned into a gay bar.”
LGBT nightlife at the time was spread across both sides of Broad Street, with the west side considered more upscale and the east a bit seedier, Skiba noted. But, largely through the efforts of the LGBT community, the area east of Broad evolved, and The Westbury made the move from Rittenhouse Square to 13th Street in 1988.
Skiba said The Westbury was the only LGBT space to move from west to east of Broad.
It called itself The New Westbury after the move but shed that moniker a few years later.
Brault took over ownership from Ned Katuran in the summer of 2009 and gave the space an extensive makeover, installing flat-screen televisions and expanding the drink and food selections.
The Westbury had been one of the city’s longest-running LGBT bars; Tavern on Camac dates back to the 1920s.
“Any time a bar that’s been around this long closes, it’s a big loss,” Skiba said, noting that The Westbury’s shuttering is particularly significant because of its unique appeal. “It was a niche bar. A lot of people thought of it as the neighborhood bar. I worked a block away at William Way and that would always be my place to stop after work for a drink and when we’d meet Wednesday nights at the archives, we’d always go to Westbury afterwards. It was our neighborhood bar; a lot of people thought of it that way. It’s really going to be missed.”