10 Years in Bushwick with Arley Marks

What a time to be a New Yorker. As we write, ticker tape falls like silver hail from heaven the length of Broadway; the Knicks have won their first NBA Finals in over half a century, their parade coursing through Lower Manhattan while the World Cup plays out across the river at the Meadowlands. At the helm is the perma-smiling millennial mayor Zohran Mamdani, a man who can do no wrong, gliding from one triumph to the next with effortless grace: extending bedtime so the city’s children could stay up to watch their basketball heroes and securing $1.2 billion for their universal childcare.

To celebrate his first 100 days as the city’s youngest mayor in a century, one of his predecessors of the old school might choose Delmonico’s, beneath the gilt and the oil portraits where the Gilded Age scions of dynastic wealth toasted their victories, or the marble hall at Cipriani, where the money likes to hear itself echo. Mamdani had somewhere else in mind. On 12th April he gave his address at The Knockdown Center in Queens, and shortly thereafter chose to celebrate with his City Hall inner circle at Honey’s, on Scott Avenue in Brooklyn’s Bushwick, a cocktail bar and dance floor designed by Jonathan Mosca, adorned with a sound system hand built by the artist Peter Brock.

Honey’s belongs to the dapper, softly spoken Arley Marks, who had wanted to throw this party long before anyone from City Hall picked up the phone. Organising is hard when you’re running a place of your own, he tells me, so when the campaign came looking, he gave it what he could. Arley had been in touch with Mamdani’s people early, back in the months when canvassers were holding parties to raise money and the candidate was still a long shot. The first hope had been to host election night on Scott Avenue, but the campaign outgrew the room, and the celebration went to the Brooklyn Paramount, at the intersection of Flatbush and DeKalb Avenues. The hundred days brought it back. Staffers reached out, settled on a weeknight, and Arley set up alongside his business partner, Daniel Gladstone, with little idea of what the evening would become. Then came a cheerful hello from the top of the stairs, and the beaming mayor came down into the room: gracious, happy to stop for photographs, he made his way to the decks where Yavez Anthonio (better known by his DJ moniker SUAVEZ) was playing and slipped in behind the booth to cue up some nineties hip-hop. His staff came too, the whole City Hall operation rather than the handful of personal aides you might expect, around fifty people spilling out onto the roof. For Arley, the night caught something about the city itself. Mamdani, he says, “understands what is beautiful and exciting and energetic” about living in New York City today, after a string of mayors who struck him as flat and who could get nothing done. What he saw instead with Mamdani, was a “can-do energy” and a “love of life”, a man doing hard work and dancing the night away.

If you have heard of Honey’s — apart from it having hosted the aforementioned Mamdani party — it could be that Honey’s is a mead bar. Arley didn’t come to mead by accident. He grew up back-to-the-land, on an old defunct dairy farm upstate, his parents the sort who wanted their children raised among organic gardens, the hippie idiom softened a degree or two but plainly there. New York, in that childhood, was the frightening opposite of everything he knew, a rugged sort of place at the far end of the imagination from the gardens he’d been raised in. He went to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), in Providence, a post-industrial city full of old mill buildings given over to artists. He lived in one of them. The appeal was that you made your own space inside the shell: he built a sleeping pod fixed to the ceiling, reached by a long zigzagging staircase, the whole room a kind of beatnik Gesamtkunstwerk, where everything was constructed not by an all-encompassing sense of pre-planned design but an improvised commitment to making it up as the space demanded. He studied furniture design before he ultimately moved to sculpture, and what carried across was the pleasure of tools, of building an entirely invented world you could stand inside. That instinct, the maker’s instinct, never left him.

Friends from RISD started peeling off to New York. He resisted for a while; he didn’t want to arrive simply because everyone else had. Among them were Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta, who would become the fashion label Eckhaus Latta, and it was through their early days on the Bowery that Arley’s two trades first fused. He’d taken to making cocktails inside fish tanks for their presentations, sculpture you could drink: a cornstarch slurry clouding the inner walls of the glass, long curls of lemon hung beside hydrated basil seeds swelling in aged gin and raspberry liqueur. The job that made it a vocation was Mission Chinese Food, on Orchard Street, where he worked in 2010 and 2011.

He’d walked in while the place was still being gutted, a plumbing problem somewhere in the works, and his brief was to design and build the bar, then the dining room around it. Once the room existed, he took over what went across the bar, the beverage programme and the cocktails, which grew steadily more sculptural as he leaned on the only skills he’d ever really had. Mission Chinese became the most talked-about restaurant in the city, the Lower East Side at full pitch, Anthony Bourdain a regular.

From there he bartended his way around downtown and helped open Dimes on Canal Street, which began as Dimes Deli and grew into a café. He met its owner, Sabrina, there, and when she took a larger space with an arched ceiling, she handed him the bar and the drinks to design. His signature was the wheatgrass margarita, a Blanco tequila margarita greened with a shot of fresh-pressed wheatgrass, the garden of his childhood smuggled into a Canal Street cocktail. It turns out the line from the dairy farms to Honey’s runs straighter than it looks.

Mission Chinese, Dimes, now Honey’s: for twenty years Arley has been building the rooms New York want to get into. Which is how, one night last May, the most photographed couple on earth turned up at one of them. Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce came to a friend’s wedding at Honey’s, two people whose every public appearance generates a security perimeter and a thousand raised phones, and for one evening they were simply guests in Bushwick, in a room Arley built out of hemlock and old industrial zoning law, with his mother’s logo on the door. Honey’s became, for a moment at least, what it was designed not to be: a spectacle. But this is an old idea of New York: the celebrity elites seek out the rough-and-ready bohemians, because the margin is where distinction is minted, and the people with the most of everything come looking for the one thing money can’t buy. The city has always run on people going where no one thought to go. There is a darker version of that instinct, the one Robert Moses made famous, driving expressways through living neighbourhoods in the name of the new; Arley works the other way round, finding the cheap edge of the map and building something a community can hold on to rather than have something done to it.

And so last night, as I write, Honey’s celebrated its tenth anniversary. Arley and his business partner Daniel led a chorus of “Happy Birthday” and shot off confetti cannons, with Anthony from Ha's Dac Biet out front on the BBQ, and tapped a barrel of cherry wine for Cardamaro spritzes. What a time to be a New Yorker, and how rare to find the man serving both Taylor Swift and the most popular socialist in the world in the same booth as the rest of us.