{"id":279678,"date":"2026-06-27T04:36:48","date_gmt":"2026-06-27T04:36:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/279678\/"},"modified":"2026-06-27T04:36:48","modified_gmt":"2026-06-27T04:36:48","slug":"ninety-years-of-the-montero-brooklyns-legendary-galician-bar-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/279678\/","title":{"rendered":"Ninety years of the Montero, Brooklyn\u2019s legendary Galician bar | Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"

Years ago, you could sense the Galician influence on the Brooklyn waterfront. Dockworkers looked forward to the end of their shift so they could warm their bones with whisky, good company, and a caldo gallego. To get there, one had to turn one\u2019s back on the bay and the Manhattan skyline, walk up Atlantic Avenue following the crews who had just disembarked, and let oneself be guided by a succession of neon signs in the red-light district that was then the Spanish corner of Brooklyn Heights. It was there that Spanish migrants served those who labored on the docks, plus sailors<\/a>, the ones who had docked for a few days and the ones who were aground indefinitely. A dozen bars, many with Spanish names, flanked the street as though it were the entryway to an entirely different continent. The neighborhood lived and died within unmapped borders in the great city, permanently mired in a sensation halfway between rootlessness and homesickness. But the death blow came when the docks closed in the 1970s. The sailors left, the rents started going up, and the \u201cgallegos\u201d left seeking new ports, some returning to their native shores in northwestern Spain, others going further inland, others six feet under. Just two bars, the Long Island and the Montero \u2014 owned by two siblings who spent 50 years on opposite sides of the same street without speaking to each other \u2014 withstood the test of time and money thanks to their family motto of \u201cbuy, don\u2019t rent.\u201d The notion of securing a place where they could die in peace was deeply ingrained in the immigrant subconscious. The Long Island was sold years ago. The Montero will soon mark nine decades on its side of the port, but even Atlantic Avenue\u2019s last Galician remnant has just changed hands.<\/p>\n

\"\"Maritime-inspired decorations at Bar Montero, including a painting of Sada beach in A Coru\u00f1a, Spain.
\nSeila montes<\/p>\n

You\u2019re pulled in by the red neon. You walk through a doorway in a glass-bricked wall and step into a picture-perfect scene of what Brooklyn once was. It\u2019s narrow, deep and dark. The walls are made of wood, but not a single inch of them has been left bare, with orange life preservers hung from the ceiling and portraits on the walls of sailors whose names have been forgotten, long-gone regulars, and members of the Montero family. There are rudders, hatches, knots, oars, model ships that sailors built on the high seas to stave off boredom. On the left is the bar, a red Formica atop glass bricks affair. On the right, two phone booths that were already old half a century ago. There\u2019s a pool table. At around 6 p.m. on a recent Friday, five people are having a drink; in a few hours, the dive will be packed thanks to karaoke \u2014 which breathes new life into it Thursday through Sunday. Usually, Pepe sits on his stool at the back of the bar.<\/p>\n

\"\"Pepe Montero, in the Brooklyn Heights bar founded 86 years ago by his father Joseph.Seila montes<\/p>\n

Atlantic Avenue\u2019s last Galician sports white hair, a Montero baseball hat, a button-down shirt and blue jeans, nothing too unusual. He speaks Spanish with a Brooklyn accent. He emphasizes his sentences with yeah\u2019s, allright\u2019s and you know\u2019s. He is about to turn 80 years old. The thought invokes a half-smile that shows his teeth and suggests more than he\u2019s telling. His father Joseph Montero came from Meir\u00e1s. His mother Pilar was born in Manhattan\u2019s Little Spain neighborhood back when 30,000 Spaniards lived in New York City. The Monteros opened a bar at 56 Atlantic Avenue in 1939. But construction of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, the highway that connects the island to the continent, felled its first location and turned that corner of the neighborhood into a series of phantom street signs. After the demolition, Joseph Montero took on debt twice without going through a bank, bought a building at 73 Atlantic Avenue on the opposite side of the street, and built another tavern.<\/p>\n

Pepe was born on the top floor of Montero\u2019s new building in 1947, the year the bar crossed the street. He was brought into the world by two British sisters \u201cwho were almost like a hospital.\u201d In school, they thought he was \u201chow do you say it? Bobo (dumb),\u201d until they discovered that he was just Spanish. He grew up within the limits of that world between two bodies of water, surrounded by accents that were just passing through, framed Galician landscapes and memories inherited from an unknown homeland. Joseph and Pilar tended the bar starting at eight in the morning, when the dockworkers\u2019 night shift ended, until four in the morning, when the last sailors were on the verge of collapse. Pepe played in the street with other Galician boys. He didn\u2019t learn the language of his birth country until he was six years old and started school, at which point he glimpsed a world beyond Atlantic Avenue.<\/p>\n

He says those were simpler times. Perhaps they were. The docks were the natural habitat of people who had their own notion of honor and morality. Port nights were full of violence, drugs<\/a> and sex for money. And after World War II,<\/a> there was hunger too.<\/p>\n

\"\"Montero, a Brooklyn Heights institution, was founded 86 years ago by the Galician immigrant Joseph Montero and his wife Pilar, to serve the sailors of the nearby port. Their son Pepe sold the business after decades of running the place.Seila montes<\/p>\n

\u201cMany women had to raise their kids alone. Many of those buildings that are now worth $8, $10, $15 million dollars, at that time were part of the red-light district. Everyone helped as much as they could because everyone had to survive. And they got together here, at the bar, to talk about their worries and their problems,\u201d Pepe says.<\/p>\n

Pepe first went to Galicia when he was 10 years old. But he seldom returned. His father traveled there faithfully for a few months a year. He crossed the Atlantic on El Guadalupe or El Covadonga, the ships that traveled the New York-A Coru\u00f1a route, weighed down with presents for friends. He bought sardines from the fishermen who went out to sea from Sada de Arriba and fixed up the family home. Pepe started working at the bar during vacations from school when he turned 13 years old. One morning in the \u201870s, he came into the kitchen and saw a man taking his clothes off. Joseph explained to him that it wasn\u2019t a man, but rather, the famous British model Twiggy, the androgynous face of Swinging London, who was posing alongside Montero\u2019s kitsch d\u00e9cor. Pepe still has a photograph from that long-ago session tucked away on the bar\u2019s walls. <\/p>\n

\"\"Karaoke night at the Montero.Seila montes<\/p>\n

The first member of the family to come to the United States was his grandfather Ram\u00f3n, a native of Meir\u00e1s who wanted to get away from the military presence in Spain, putting the Atlantic between him and it at some point in the 1920s. Ram\u00f3n Montero worked half his life for Con Edison, the company that brought electricity to New York \u2014 a lucrative gig in the city that never sleeps. Ram\u00f3n knew how to squeeze the juice from the new world, investing in the company\u2019s stocks when they were worth nothing and retiring with a good pension plus dividends. In the middle of the century, he built the Long Island a block from Montero. Like many Galicians from his generation, in his old age he heard the call of the homeland. He sold the Long Island to his daughter Emma. The dollar was gaining value against the weak peseta when Ram\u00f3n returned to Galicia<\/a> in his old age. He had the orgullo de los indianos, as the traditional pride of the returnees from America to Spain in those days was called. Also, a Pontiac he had shipped from New York, in which he\u2019d cruise down Calle Real in A Coru\u00f1a. <\/p>\n

\"\"Neighborhood kids with Manhattan in the background.Seila montes<\/p>\n

Joseph came to the United States in his early years. As a young man, he signed on and spent years aboard Danish merchant ships. When he finally dropped anchor, he didn\u2019t stray far from the docks. He signed on again during the war to deliver supplies to ships fighting in Europe. Pilar had been a flamenco dancer<\/a>. In the pool room \u2014 which for years served as the bar\u2019s dining room \u2014 a poster from a festival still hangs on the wall, announcing the sensational performance of Pilar Montero, a party that lasted until dawn with dances like fandangos, sevillanas, rumbas, seguidillas and tarantas.<\/p>\n

Before opening the bar, Joseph and Pilar ran a grocery store, which they eventually sold to Emma. The highway was built soon after, and put it out of business. That was the start of a feud that would become deeply entrenched. The two branches of the Montero family grew old, each on their own side of the street, serving the same customers, listening to the same stories, and harboring different perspectives of the same grudge. <\/p>\n

\"\"The bar\u2019s pool room, previously its dining room where Pilar, Joseph\u2019s wife, served food to sailors.Seila montes<\/p>\n

Between 1955 and 1970, the winds changed. Mechanization of their labor left the dockworkers obsolete. New York lost its patience with the wars over control of the port and its unions between the Italian and Irish mafias. The port moved to New Jersey and the sailors went with it. Some still crossed the bay out of loyalty to the Monteros. Then Manhattan\u2019s money made the leap over the East River and cleaned up the red-light district. Today, the docks are parks.<\/p>\n

Pepe\u2019s generation graduated, swapped out their parents\u2019 businesses for offices and restaurants; Brooklyn Heights for family-friendly suburbs. They visited Montero every once in a while, like their parents had visited Galicia every once in a while, until their time ran out. \u201cI would be the youngest, and I\u2019m about to be in my 80s,\u201d Pepe says. He stayed between the two bodies of water, as he always had. He taught in public schools for 40 years, but never let go of the Montero. Like him, the bar was stuck between two eras.<\/p>\n

One day, the Spanish-born writer Eduardo Lago docked on Montero\u2019s shores. In 1988, Federico and Achero Ma\u00f1as, two brothers who wanted to make movies, rented him a studio in the 19th century brownstone they shared with their mother on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade, on a hill overlooking the East River, lower Manhattan and the cranes of the Ports of Jersey. Eduardo liked to watch how the light changed as the afternoon sun reflected off the glass facades of Wall Street skyscrapers. Then, he\u2019d end up at the corner bar, a place that helped ease his nostalgia for Spain, run by an old Galician sailor who seemed to have come straight out of a book.<\/p>\n

At the time, a new generation of Spaniards were arriving, exiles like playwright Ferm\u00edn Cabal, writer Javier Puebla, Ceesepe and El Hortelano and the actress Ana Torrent. Some would stay until dawn with Lago and the Ma\u00f1as brothers at Montero. Lago hung out at the bar with the other regulars and with Joseph, a man who would take up with any lost cause who walked through the door. There was also a guy with dwarfism as tall as the bar who drank miniature Budweisers (\u201cscaled to his size, but he\u2019d make you think your perspective was off, that you were the giant,\u201d Lago recalls). There was also a \u201cgay Cuban with a glass eye\u201d and a man who drank and wrote alone, at the far end of the bar.<\/p>\n

Joseph made Lago his confidant, telling him stories from his earlier days. \u201cHe reminded me a lot of the Cervantes character from Rinconete and Cortadillo, trapped in a hazy milieu with underworld elements, but quite honorable,\u201d says Lago. One night in 1988, Lago came home from Montero and began to write. He didn\u2019t stop for 20 years. The slow burn of two decades fused those early mornings at Montero into stories in his head, and resulted in his first novel. Its protagonist is a tormented journalist who drinks and writes alone in a Brooklyn port tavern owned by a Galician and frequented by Dutch sailors, a young writer, a man with dwarfism and a gay Cuban with a glass eye. He called it Call Me Brooklyn.<\/p>\n

At the end of the century, Joseph said goodbye to his family. \u201cHe said, \u2018I want to go back to Galicia and see the last of my friends who are still alive,\u201d remembers Pepe. The family home in Meir\u00e1s was around the corner from a small church where the family of the late dictator Francisco Franco went to Sunday mass when they summered at their pazo<\/a>, a traditional residence often inhabited by nobility. As a young man, one day Joseph had approached the priest, Don Antonio, and negotiated a berth in the cemetery. \u201cAnd when he died in Spain, we all went over there and he was buried in Meir\u00e1s, in the mausoleum he had waiting for him.\u201d That was the last time Pepe set foot in Galicia. He would like to return.<\/p>\n

But, to live there?<\/p>\n

\u201cJust for vacations. Not to live, I\u2019m staying here. All my friends are here, and my children.\u201d When they ask him where he is from, what does he say? New York or Galicia?<\/p>\n

\u201cGalicia,\u201d he answers.<\/p>\n

Pilar outlived her husband<\/a> by more than a decade, becoming a fixture on her stool at the bar\u2019s entrance. There, she would welcome her old Galician friends, doze off, or spend the afternoon drinking with Frank McCourt, another writer who moved into the apartment above the bar, won the Pulitzer Prize, and would later recall in his memoirs the red flicker of its neon sign against his bedroom window. \u201cEvery day he\u2019d sit in the corner with my mother, and the two of them would get drunk,\u201d says Pepe. Pilar died in 2012, having become one of those figures with street cred that New York delights in calling its own. The New York Times ran her obituary<\/a>.<\/p>\n

After Joseph\u2019s death, Lago stopped passing by Montero so much. \u201cIt took me years to realize what had happened there,\u201d he says. He moved to Manhattan, won Spain\u2019s Nadal literary award, and ran New York\u2019s Instituto Cervantes for a few years. In March, he returned to the bar after a long time without having done so. He walked around looking at its walls, nearly recognizing them by touch, rediscovering in its photos faces of his Call Me Brooklyn characters he hadn\u2019t seen in years. He didn\u2019t stay long. Then he walked to the house where he\u2019d lived with the Ma\u00f1as brothers, and returned to Manhattan via the promenade, watching how the light changed in the afternoon.<\/p>\n

Pepe inherited the building his parents had bought for a few thousand dollars, and sold it for millions. Its new owners, two siblings who own several nautical-themed restaurants, had been after the Montero for years. They\u2019ve promised to keep it exactly as it is, without disturbing a speck of dust. They even plan to reopen the kitchen. Pepe wants to retire: the long-awaited return to Galicia. It\u2019s hard to imagine the bar without him. The siblings want him to help them, to ensure that the last witness to a time when Brooklyn Heights spoke Spanish<\/a> with a Galician accent and Atlantic Avenue was the gateway to New York stays within these walls, as in a cramped ship\u2019s cabin. Perhaps he will. <\/p>\n

Sign up for our weekly newsletter<\/a> to get more English-language news coverage from EL PA\u00cdS USA Edition <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Years ago, you could sense the Galician influence on the Brooklyn waterfront. Dockworkers looked forward to the end…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":279679,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[107402,98,100,99,107404,107403,107401,9,24,63],"class_list":["post-279678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brooklyn","tag-a-coruna","tag-brooklyn","tag-brooklyn-headlines","tag-brooklyn-news","tag-eduardo-lago","tag-frank-mccourt","tag-galicia","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=279678"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/279678\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/279679"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=279678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=279678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=279678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}