A beloved Bushwick bar is under new management — kind of.
Dromedary Bar, a former Tiki bar on Irving Avenue, has been transformed into Dromedary: Coming Out, a colorful, collectively-run queer space staffed by a team of familiar bartenders and employees.
The bar originally opened in 2016 under the ownership of Michael Lombardozzi. Last fall Lombardozzi opened two new businesses – Dromedary Doughnuts, a colorful bakery, and Ra Ra Rhino, a speakeasy tucked behind the donut shop.
As he turned his focus toward his new endeavors and started pondering the future of the bar, Dromedary employees joked with each other about taking over the space, said bartender Justine Musselman.
Then, the conversation became “What if this wasn’t a joke? What if we made this happen?” she said.
And they did: In late December, the bar hosted fundraising events for “New Dromedary.” In January, it closed for repairs and renovations — most done by the team themselves. Last month, Dromedary: Coming Out officially reopened with its old bones intact but most everything else revamped.
When the Dromedary team decided to move forward with their plans to take over the bar together, they also chose to move into a “collaborative, worker-operated” model, said bartender Babz Law.
No one at Dromedary had really pictured themselves owning or running a bar, Musselman said. Taking over the space wasn’t strictly a business decision.
“It’s really about how much we all cared about the space over the years before any of us worked here,” Law said. “We were all regulars, we came here, we hung out here, our friends had birthdays here … Our relationship with this place and the people surrounding it has been a much longer one than our own jobs.”
Dromedary wasn’t founded as a gay bar, but it regularly hosted drag and burlesque events — and slowly became a de-facto queer space in the nabe.
“Despite it not being an intentional queer space, I did have a good…
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