These members are looking for a new club.
Bushwick bar Kings County Saloon, home to the famed Smallest Penis in Brooklyn pageant, will close for good this Sunday, but the organizers of the tavern’s signature event are still hoping they can keep it up elsewhere, the owner says.
“We’re wondering if somebody would be interested in taking it on,” said general manager Amy Arciuolo, who co-owns the bar at the corner of Knickerbocker and, ahem, Johnson avenues. “But as for now it’s on hiatus. They’re going to have to stick it somewhere else.”
For three years now, the annual celebration of wee willies and the men who own them has drawn huge crowds and world-wide media attention to the watering hole, where nearly-naked gents show off their smallest assets and compete across talent, question and answer, and swimsuit rounds for a cash prize and the title of Smallest Penis in Brooklyn.
But one night of fame a year has not been enough to keep the friendly neighborhood dive afloat in the face of the neighborhood’s rising rents, Arciuolo said.
In June last year, the bar was priced out of its hole-in-the-wall home of nearly a decade on Seigel Street and relocated to its much-larger current digs on Knickerbocker Avenue. But Arciuolo says the move robbed the venue of its “Cheers”-like charm, and the owners have continued to struggle with the cost of upkeep ever since.
“We went from a small bar to seven times the size,” she said. “It’s just very difficult. The neighborhood is changing very fast. It’s not the community bar that we used to run.”
The tavern will host a final blowout bash all weekend until closing its doors for good on Sept. 27, and Aricuolo hopes the rager will bring loyal patrons together for a last hurrah.
“We just want all the regulars to come and tell terrible stories of their worst nights at Kings,” she said. “It’s going to be a family night.”
Kings County Saloon [1 Knickerbocker Ave. at Johnson Avenue in Bushwick, (347) 987-3751, www.kings
