The bartenders drew a line in the snow and the fake Santas stood down.
Santacon, the marauding annual party in which thousands of revelers dressed as Mr. and Mrs. Claus storm New York bars, is walking back its threat to come to Bushwick. The blog Bushwick Daily revealed that organizers of the roving frat-party-with-costumes were courting neighborhood bar owners as prospective hosts for their Dec. 13 bacchanal. But at a meeting of the neighborhood’s community board on Nov. 21, a local pol announced that organizers had e-mailed him to say they were calling the incursion off.
“They agreed with me that Bushwick is not big enough to hold something as large as Santacon,” Councilman Rafael Espinal, Jr. (D–Bushwick) said at a meeting of Community Board 4, noting that the event drew more than 30,000 people to Manhattan’s East Village and environs last year.
Bushwick bar owners who had pledged to boycott the event were elated by the news. Many at the community board meeting said they are new to owning pubs and had previously worked across the East River, where Santacon wrought a path of decidedly un-family-friendly destruction every year.
“There are a lot of very young children here who still believe in Santa Claus,” said Betsy Maher, owner of Pearl’s Social and Billy Club on Saint Nicholas Avenue. “They do not need to see Santa Clauses puking or pissing themselves, or getting a h——.”
The barkeeps had said they would bar anyone in a Santa suit from coming through their doors, and they were tickled that the mass-Scrooge tactic worked.
“It is rare to see churches and bars and government all agree on the same thing,” said Travis Boettcher, owner of the bar Left Hand Path, which opened on Wyckoff Avenue in May.
