West End Bar

The West End Bar, also known for a time as the "West End Gate", was located on Broadway near 114th Street in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of the Borough of Manhattan in New York City. From its establishment in 1911, the bar served as a popular gathering place for Columbia University students, faculty and administration (its slogan was "Where Columbia Had Its First Beer"). The bar was also a meeting place for many Beat Generation writers as well as many 1960's student activists when they attended the university.

In the early 1940s, in the formative days of the Beat Generation, students including Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Lucien Carr spent hours at the bar discussing their studies and their futures. In the 1960s, the bar was host to student activists upset about racial discrimination in the area and US foreign policy regarding Vietnam. Mark Rudd, who led the Columbia branch of Students for a Democratic Society and was a prominent member of the Weather Underground after his expulsion from the university in 1968, spent time at the bar while a student.

After closing for a year and a half, it was leased from Columbia University by a group led by Jeff Spiegel and his wife Katie Gardner, a graduate of Columbia's School of Journalism. They renovated The West End, making an effort to have it look like everyone thought it might have looked as an old Victorian era bar/restaurant. They expanded one room for catering, parties and even beer pong, a basement room for live Jazz, and a large side dining room that could be used late night, after the kitchen was closed, by drinkers and revelers.

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