New Haven’s Anchor Bar gone, Yale Properties seeking new tenant Storied watering hole lost its lease

The Anchor Bar in New Haven when two of its lights were out The Anchor Bar in New Haven when two of its lights were out Photo: Journal Register Co. Photo: Journal Register Co. Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close New Haven’s Anchor Bar gone, Yale Properties seeking new tenant 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

NEW HAVEN >> The historic Anchor Bar has closed forever.

Owner Charles Moore, whose father, Marshall Moore, “was the patriarch” of the downtown pub, said Monday he has no interest in continuing the business now that Yale University Properties has ended its lease.

The Anchor served its last drink Sunday evening.

The management company, DWN Enterprises, which is owned by David Nyberg, had operated the Anchor since late 2012 but hadn’t been able to keep up with the rent, according to John Pollard, whose Real Estate Advisors Ltd. represents Yale University Properties.

Nyberg could not be reached for comment.

Finding a replacement for the Anchor “will be a process that will begin now to find the best user for the place,” Pollard said Monday.

“It’s a totally open question” what kind of business will locate at 272 College St., Pollard said. “Would it be a bar? I couldn’t say that,” Pollard said.

Moore said the business started at Anchor Beach in the Woodmont section of Milford and “was truly a family business for a number of years.”

The Anchor moved to College Street “sometime in the mid-’40s,” Moore, a mechanical engineer, said. However, “families change over the years as well” and he said the Moores have no more interest in keeping the Anchor open. Since 2000, when Marshall Moore died, “it hasn’t been the same,” Charles Moore said.

“The Anchor truly was his stage,” Moore said of his father, who had owned the Anchor since 1963. “My father and Thornton Wilder were best friends … and the antics they would get into — your sides would truly split open.” Wilder was a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright who lived in Hamden.

Pollard said University Properties could have closed the Anchor in the fall for failure to keep up with the rent but allowed Nyberg to keep it open through the holidays.

According to a statement from Yale, “As requested by DWN, University Properties agreed that closure would be in early January 2015, after the holiday season, in order to allow them ample time to inform employees.”

On Sunday, however, employees said they were told at 4 p.m. that day that they had lost their jobs. “That you’d have to talk to Mr. Nyberg (about), but Yale was sensitive” to employees’ need to know their future, Pollard said.

Esquire named the Anchor one of the country’s 25 best bars in 2014. Its writeup compared the bar to the “cocktail lounges” of the 1930s: “The Anchor is one of those survivors, and though it is a perfectly nice place — warm and comfortable, with a great old jukebox and a way with the martini and the more basic of its relations — you still very quickly get the sense that you’d best step carefully, because the ice there runs thin.”

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