While weekly karaoke nights, a Lavender Country Line dancing event, and a Field Day party (masks still required) are on the calendar, the embattled Last Ditch Bar and Arts Venue is closing.
The bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts, made headlines in September when a decision to drop a self-imposed mask mandate on Saturday nights sparked an uproar among a segment of its clientele, who protested that management was ableist and abandoning immunocompromised patrons in the name of profits.
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The bar had already been in financial straits for months; the masking change was an effort to earn more business and stay financially viable.
“Just say you’re being complicit in a mass disabling event and get it over with,” wrote one commenter on Instagram, where the change was met with hundreds of comments, most of them negative.
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But the blowback earned its own backlash online, with people mocking customers’ concerns about contracting COVID.
The back-and-forth inspired widespread coverage, even raising hopes for last co-owner standing Jackie Mattellian that the attention would boost a fundraising push they’d already started.
It did, bringing in 144% of a $15,000 fundraising goal.
But it still wasn’t enough to put the bar on a good financial footing.
Mattellian was already on the hook for a $50,000 loan after her founding partners abandoned the project. The bar owed thousands of dollars in back rent, employees weren’t getting paid, and Mattellian was living out of the back of their truck.
They shared their decision to call it quits on socials.
“WE ARE CLOSING,” they posted to Instagram last Monday, after an effort to reorganize the bar’s management structure as a co-op failed to attract enough supporters to form a board of directors.
“We have put our lives on hold to foster networks of care, resources, and a home base for organizing. It’s time we pass it on,” Mattellian said. “We are SOFT CLOSING effective immediately.”
A local reporter confirmed the bar was closed on Monday during regular business hours.
Everything goes, according to an announcement on the bar’s website, including kitchen and bar equipment, furniture, fixtures, and inventory. Mattellian hopes to raise $70,000 from the fire sale to pay back their business loan and compensate employees for back wages.
They’ve offered to train new owners in the event they can find someone willing to pick up the Last Ditch mantle.
Last year, Mattellian and her partners were the ones running the inclusive space directed at “dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers, and their friends” in the progressive Massachusetts enclave, where the closure of a couple of other like bars had left the community bereft of a place to gather.
“I thought, ‘Somebody has to do it,’ and we didn’t know of anybody else who was going to save one of the two places,” Matellian told the Greenfield Recorder. “So we were like, ‘OK, I guess we have to do it.’”
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