In a section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, transformed in recent years by modern apartment buildings and fast-casual restaurants, a nondescript door on Grand Street is the entrance to Toñita’s, one of the last Puerto Rican outposts of its kind in New York City. Here the patrons drink $3 beer and play dominoes, or sit around chatting over free plates of food like arroz con gandules.
The walls are decorated with Puerto Rican flags and portraits of the bar’s owner and matriarchal figure, Maria Antonia Cay, better known as Toñita. She opened the business in the 1970s as the Caribbean Social Club, a meeting place for members of the neighborhood baseball team. In 2000, she obtained a liquor license and opened the go-to place for cheap drinks and jars of Puerto Rican food that she makes in the kitchen of her apartment upstairs. (She bought the building decades ago.)
“It reminds me of home,” says Djali Brown-Cepeda, an archivist and filmmaker who runs the Nuevayorkinos Instagram account.
As neighborhoods like Williamsburg gentrify and close businesses owned and frequented by people of color, many of the people who grew up there fear they will lose community outposts where they can speak Spanish, dance and play games. Ms. Cay said she has been paid millions of dollars for the building but will not sell it.
Several dozen regulars held a rally outside the Manhattan municipal building last month after a visit from a city inspector raised concerns. Ms Cay said the inspector asked for minor repairs which she has since completed. The city has also received at least 10 noise complaints about the club in the past year. The bar is rated A by the city health department, which last inspected it in April.
“I wasn’t worried” about the closure, Ms Cay, 83, said in Spanish. “I will stay here with my people as long as I can. This is not for me to make money or a fortune. It’s to maintain a space where we can all be together.”
A local secret for decades, the club has recently attracted the attention of celebrities such as Maluma and Madonna, who shared a joint photo shoot there for Rolling Stone in 2021. The reggaetonero Bad Bunny also visited and gave Mrs. Cay a hug.
Most nights, Mrs. Cay runs the show from a bar stool in the back. Her fingernails are always immaculate and her blonde hair is styled perfectly, even though the two rooms heat up as the night goes on. She says she’s not retiring, and she doesn’t know who will take over when she’s gone.
Her clients defend Ms. Cay as if she were their own abuela, or grandmother, Ms. Brown-Cepeda said.
“We have to protect this woman, we have to protect this place. It’s sacred,” she said, adding that people of color were “really tired” of the arrival of developers and the departure of older local businesses, such as Chino Latino restaurants.
Social clubs like this have long been popular in Cuba and Puerto Rico, first beginning to open in New York City in the 1920s when immigrants arrived, said Nancy Raquel Mirabal, a professor at the University of Maryland, College Park and the author of “Suspect Freedoms,” a 2017 book about Cuban immigration and politics in New York.
Initially, these clubs were places where people gathered to speak Spanish, eat their own food, and discuss politics. Later they formed a hub for networking, learning English and gaining new professional skills; some even offered access to health insurance. Over the past half century, the clubs have attracted people from many different Latino cultures.
In her 2022 best-selling novel ‘Olga Dies Dreaming’, author Xochitl Gonzalez dedicates a chapter to Toñita’s, which she calls Sylvia’s Social Club. It is run by a glamorous Puerto Rican woman who treats her customers as if they were guests in her home. Ms. Gonzalez, who grew up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, frequented Frank’s Cocktail Lounge, a black-owned business in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, which closed in 2020, as well as Toñita’s, when she was a young adult.
“It’s more than just a bar,” says Mrs. Gonzalez, who is a staff writer for The Atlantic. “It is a place where so many aspects of culture are preserved. Sometimes the Puerto Rican influence in this city is so invisible that they will miss us when we are gone.”