Dreamer's Lounge

While the building at 589 Pine Street appears to go back to the 19th century, there was no bar operating there prior to 1891. By 1914 a saloon had been established there, with Charles P. Schmidt as proprietor. Max Roth operated it from 1918 through at least 1921. By 1924 a tailor, Joseph Berlin, had bought the building and was in business at 589 Pine, and was still at that location as late as April of 1930.

A liquor license was obtained for the premises when Prohibition was repealed in 1933, and the bar was known as the Pine Street Tavern. In 1939 the bar changed hands and soon the name was changed to Nora’s Cafe when Michele “Mike” Barbalace and his brother Ferdinando “Fred” became the proprietors. The name Nora’s Cafe was for the brothers’ mother Eleanora, who lived in the village of San Ferdinando in Calabria, Italy. Following a fire at the premises, the brothers remodeled the bar and added a restaurant and a “Ladies Entrance” off Sixth Street. The entire Barbalace family, including Fred and their German Shepherd “King,” lived at Sixth and Pine Streets until 1958, when the brothers retired, sold the building and the business, and moved to Westmont, NJ.

The bar was known as Steve’s Tavern by May of 1961. By 1966 the bar had been renamed Vince & Fred’s Tavern after the two owners, Vince Santoferraro and Fred Cinelli. 589 Pine Street was known as Vince & Fred’s Tavern as late as 1977.

The bar changed hands again and was known in the 1980s and early 1990s as Dreamer’s Lounge. By the mid-1980s the neighborhood had become very bad, and the bar was shut down in the early 1990s, never to reopen. The building at 589 Pine Street sat boarded up and abandoned before being razed in the spring of 2012.