I had only been to Rash (941 Willoughby Ave.) perhaps just once or twice, though I could remember both times perfectly. The first, an airy summer night; retreating from Birdy’s in search of a second location; not staying for very long under the techno club’s exacting red bulbs.
“I brought the Red Bull fridge home, but I don’t have info on why they closed other than we weren’t making a lot of money,” a bartender told me a few days after their final shift. This had been the talk at Rash for some time. Word on the street was that the owners have been looking to get out of the Rash business and, it appeared, they finally succeeded. There was no more Rash. Bushwick, at long last, was now Rashless. The future of the space is uncertain and any news is welcome.
The other time I went to Rash was when they were showing hole.
Organized by Cyan Rivera, a bartender who started there last year, the concept was two words long and easy to fit on a flier in all caps: HOLE CONTEST. For the first time in a while, there was a line stretching around the corner to get in, police watching from a distance, and perhaps choosing to believe that such a thing could not exist. If so, they were wrong. For Rivera & co., it was the most business the struggling bar had seen, a different bartender told me, since it had reopened after a crazed software developer lit the place on fire in 2022. It’s not easy to be Bushwick’s Rash, appearing and re-appearing, simmering under the skin.
photos taken by Bobby Lee Palmer and Brandon McClain.
“New York has such a range of scenes and we try to cater to so many, so it’s been fun each night to see a different wave of people take it over and put their spin on it,” the bar’s then-owner Jen Sillen told Interview magazine shortly after the reopening in 2024. “I’m still taking in all the data because it’s so new,” she would say, impressively. Sillen wouldn’t stay very long. Rivera tells me that she was out by the time Hole was shown.
Positioned as that corner of Bushwick’s more risque, harder gay club (I was more of a Happyfun Hideaway gal myself), Rash represented both the neighborhood’s outré possibilities and its commitment to dancing seriously. For a moment, Rash was, as New York party columnist Brock Colyar once had it, “the community’s chosen successor” to Bossa Nova Civic Club, after Bossa’s smoke-filled floors were also closed because of a different fire. But Bossa would reopen, before Rash would, and, by then, “the next Bossa” was just the old Bossa. And there was less money going around. Pink Metal, a gay club on the other side of Bushwick, was calling it quits too. “Despite our very best efforts, we haven’t been able to make ends meet,” the owners wrote on Instagram.
And yet, in some way, Rash persists. Even a week ago, right as Rivera & co. were distributing their final High Lifes, Pitchfork had begun posting reposting a 2022 blog about DJs playing a fundraiser held to re-open the Rash, brought back to life with social copy that now uncannily evoked the formless cadence of ChatGPT: “Trans women DJs aren’t just succeeding—they’re innovating sounds and spaces that cut to the heart of what dance music can be.”
When Little Skips opened in the early 2010s, it was across the street from a pharmacy that would later become Norbert’s Pizza, which would later get shut down by the health department and then become Birdy’s.
Before Rash was a place to innovate sounds and spaces, it had been a coffee shop: the original location of Little Skips, part of the first or second wave of small places to work on a laptop that illuminated the neighborhood in the early 2010s. Before the backroom was used for hole contests1, it hosted art shows, open mics and cafe guitarists; before the rent doubled and sent owner Linda Thach packing2 to a different cafe she also ran in Bushwick, which she would also leave a few years later. These days, she appears to be selling something called “handcrafted ayurvedic herbal ghees,” though they couldn’t salve this Rash.
top photo taken by Andrew Karpan.
- And “even (allegedly) orgies advertised on the cruising app Sniffies,” reports one East Bushwick lurker. ↩︎
- Somewhat ironically considering its later incarnation, Thach would tell a defunct local blog that she refused to open the cafe later into the night and start selling drinks because “I don’t want to get people drunk … I want people to get buzzed on creativity and thinking.”
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