Bemelmans Bar, the watering hole at the Carlyle hotel, is certainly one of the world’s best places to get a drink—and has been for most of its 75-plus-years existence. But it’s also undergoing a bit of an identity crisis. For seven decades it was simply a good place to enjoy a cocktail surrounded by whimsical wallpaper by the guy who did the Madeline books. Circa 2019 one could reliably find a spot to have a too-big martini as the tickling of ivories wafted through the room. Now, it’s a full-blown TikTok hot spot, and the lines for tables start forming around five, and quickly wind down Madison Avenue. Waiters dodge Gen Z selfie-takers. The days of seeing Paul McCartney drinking pineapple margaritas or Prince Harry and Meghan Markle tippling incognito in the corner might be over. It’s good to share a favorite place with a new generation, and it’s still got that Bemelmans magic during off-hours, but maybe it’s not clear who Bemelmans is for these days.
Not that any of this seemed to bother Hamilton Leithauser, the six-foot-four lead singer of the beloved aughts rock band The Walkmen, as he walked into Bemelmans on a busy night last month, and was seated immediately at a table right next to Earl Rose, the most senior of the bar’s piano men, prompting Earl to call out to Leithauser mid-croon for a hello. A red-tuxedoed water promptly brought him a whiskey sour.
Does it seem odd that a 45-year-old rock star best known for a series of albums more than a decade ago is treated by the staff of The Carlyle as if he lives there? Actually, he does live there, kind of. On and off for the past five years, Leithauser has used The Walkmen’s extended hiatus as an excuse for a residency at Café Carlyle, the intimate cabaret nestled in the opulent lobby. While he’s performing he lives in a suite upstairs. After his shows, he drinks at the bar and parties in the suite. He had just wrapped another residency in March, spending every night at this exact place, so between sips of a martini, I had to ask, “Ham, do you ever get sick of hanging at Bemelmans Bar?”
“Fuck no,” Leithauser said. “The last time I was sitting here, this was two weeks ago, I was right over there, and Eric Adams was sitting right there. He walked in at one in the morning. Isn’t that weird? He was with his group. The weird part was, we were all kind of like, ‘Um?’ and the waiter was like, ‘Oh, yeah, he comes in every single night.’”
He had some other fun stories.
“I met Bill Murray here five years ago, and he and I sat over there”—pointing to the golden-lit counter—“until the entire bar was closed and then they just kept it open and we got completely shit-housed drunk, and it was incredible,” he said. “And then two years later, I’ll walk in and he’s sitting right there.”
Murray and Leithauser, upon reuniting, embraced, and carried on the imbibing from years back. Why not?
“I was just like, ‘Fuck, when am I ever going to do this again?’”
The uptown days are numbered for Leithauser. Last year came the shock announcement that he would reunite with his bandmates for a string of shows at Webster Hall, marking their first time playing together in nearly a decade. For literate indie rock fans of a certain age, the idea of just one more Walkmen show is a huge deal—one friend dubbed it “The Last Waltz for people who watched season two of The O.C. in real time.” (Seth Cohen got a job at the Bait Shop just so he could see The Walkmen perform, in case you forgot.) For a stretch of a few years, few bands were as exciting and fawned over as The Walkmen, who blasted a U2-esque squall of electric shimmer cut through by Leithauser’s Dylan-like wails, all washed in a church organ that gave the proceedings their spectral oomph. The shows at Webster Hall sold out immediately.
As Leithhauser and I drank, the shows were a few weeks out. You might think it’d be good to bang out a few songs to shake the cobwebs off. Instead, they decided to go on national television cold, a decade since they last played together.
“Paul lives in Spain, Pete lives in LA, Walt lives upstate, and Matt lives in Philly—I’m the only one that lives here,” Leithauser said. “We’re going to do The Colbert Show without having rehearsed a single time.”
If you were wondering why this art column took time off from mega-collectors and biennales to talk to an indie rocker at a hotel bar, well, have I got a surprise for you. Following in the tradition of musicians like Silver Jews’ David Berman and Pavement’s Stephen Malkmus, who both worked as security guards at The Whitney when it was on the Upper East Side, Leithauser held a job as a security guard at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1998 to 2004, quitting only when Bows + Arrows came out and his band started getting booked on mid-aughts prime-time TV.
“Oh, this was my entrance,” he said as we walked into the VIP door of The Met near 81st Street on a spring afternoon, ducking to make sure he entered the door without knocking his head. I wanted to bring him back to his former place of employment, and he obliged, enthusiastically.
He worked there a lifetimetime ago. In the late 1990s Leithauser moved to New York when he transferred to NYU, and needed a side gig. His father was the chief of design and senior curator at the National Gallery of Art in DC, and teenage Hamilton nepo-babied his way into an internship, which led to a guard gig.
“Because my dad always worked in a museum, I always figured that would be the path I would choose,” he told me, as a Met staffer led us into a museum after hours. “No matter what you’re doing you’re always at least surrounded by cool stuff. And the great thing about working here is there’s a lot of downtime. It’s a big bureaucracy and to get things moving takes a lot of emails and phone calls and stuff. So I could find myself with a lot of hours on Monday to just walk around.”
He was living on Sixth Street in the East Village, taking the 4/5 up to The Met, working until 11 p.m., then taking a crosstown up to Harlem to record at The Walkmen’s studio, Marcata. And so during the day he tinkered with lyrics and melodies in his head while wandering through the galleries. “We’ve Been Had,” the standout track on The Walkmen’s first album, was written at The Met, and decades later the lyrics still hit. It’s a pre-jaded thinking man’s rejection of the nostalgia of a city he’s just moved to (listen up, TikTok teens), determined to make it against the odds: “Well I’m a modern guy I don’t care much for the go-go / Or the retro image I see so often, telling me to / Keep trying, maybe you’ll get here someday…”
“I wrote many, many, many songs here,” he said, as we went through the main hall. “I would have been here five days a week. I do all my songwriting in my head. I really don’t do it when I’m playing an instrument that often. And so I would just sit there paying no attention to whatever anybody was telling me. Just singing something, you know?”
We had wandered through the Egyptian sculpture wing and into the contemporary wing, where Cecily Brown’s retrospective, “Death and the Maid,” had opened to members just that morning. Unfamiliar with Brown’s work, Leithauser was an instant fan.
“This is the first show in a while where I thought, Wow, I would love to own one of these,” he said, checking out the semi-abstractions of nude bodies writing in sunshine.