“It’s easy to open a bar when you’re an ex-cop,” Luke Bonner told me on a summer afternoon inside his own bar, the one he opened a little under a year ago on Myrtle Avenue.  

Bonner wasn’t an ex-cop; he was talking about the origins of Ridgewood Ale House, the bar Louie Selamaj, local ​​ex-cop, opened there about a decade ago. Selamaj later sold it to Marcos Cordova, who kept it going a few years into the pandemic, offering workable gastropub fare and a modest sports bar alternative to nearby Cozy Corner. It had its crowd. At any rate, Cordova would sell it off to Bonner and a handful of Brooklyn and Ridgewood developers in the indie nightlife circuit. One of them, who is no longer involved in the club, Bonner tells me, had a shower curtain depicting the Hieronymus Bosch painting “Garden of Earthly Delights.” So Earthly Delights was born, inheriting the full 4AM liquor license Selamaj once procured.     

Now, Earthly Delights is gone. Or it’s about to be. The club plans to shutter its bar by the end of the month and run private events there until the lease runs out in November, says Bonner. The building itself is being sold too, he noted.

It’s not his first time closing a club because of a change in real estate fourtunes, it’s his second. Shortly before the pandemic, Bonner pivoted from working as a paralegal to debuting as a clubowner, putting up Wild Birds in Crown Heights with Julian Klepper. After the building was bought by a developer, the pair decided to split, with Klepper now occupied with “putting on an original stage production of the Odyssey at Fishkill Correctional Facility,” per his LinkedIn. 

Bonner has been helping run Earthly Delights, which quickly made a name for itself in the niche club scene. Smoke was pumped into the upstairs bar, which had been converted into a windowless, womb-like dancefloor. A blogger at Hell Gate likened it to “the belly of a whale, or the body cavity of a giant, or in an alien spacecraft’s antechamber.” A photographer for the New York Times shot the novelist Emily Witt standing inside the foggy, minimally-occupied dance floor. 

But it didn’t make money, Bonner reported, or at least enough of it.

“Cultural shifts,” he said, claiming that the bar at Earthly Delights made much less than the pandemic-era Wild Birds. 

“Absolutely different income. People were drinking there,” he said.

This appears to validate a national trend: a poll produced by Gallup earlier this month reports that “the percentage of U.S. adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup’s nearly 90-year trend.” The drinking rate among young adults, Gallup says, is down to about 50% today.

“They are much more image-conscious, which means they do not want to be seen inebriated, they want to have good skin,” says Bonner.

Bonner also has another culprit on his mind too, unmentioned by Gallup. 

“Ketamine usage is a huge problem in the scene for people’s health, first and foremost, but also for the survival of this type of business,” he says. “Don’t get me wrong, it’s always been in the scene, but it’s now just taking over the survivability of these businesses.” 

“And you don’t want to be that place that’s super aggressively going through people’s bags, flashing lights at people. That’s bad vibes. We honestly wanted to put QR codes in the bathroom and tell people ‘hey, if you’re coming to the bathroom more often then you’re coming to the bar, maybe think about throwing us $10.’”

Bonner had a lot to say about the perils of rising ketamine use on the dance floor.

“Ketamine is also not exactly the most social drug. After a certain point, it’s just naptime extravaganza, it’s like everyone is on heroin on the dance floor. It is antithetical to community building. It is antithetical to the dance community. We’ve got to speak honestly about these things.”

Earthly Delights was located at 57-38 Myrtle Avenue.