Want to feel old? Get this: Bacchus, the popular bar and restaurant at 4 South Chestnut Street (Route 208) in New Paltz, turns 50 this year. A big celebration of the anniversary is planned for all day Sunday, April 14 to express gratitude to customers and staff past and present, featuring $5 wings, $6.50 nacho plates and drink prices from 1974.
Seems like only yesterday the village planning board was complaining that the eponymous god of wine depicted in the business’ logo looked too androgynous and insisting that founder Wayne Bradford have a tuft of chest hair painted onto him. Bradford complied, but it’s a point of pride for him that he also nudged the downtown community to catch up with changing times by fostering a culture at Bacchus that welcomed a diverse clientele. “We were the first place, after Joe’s, where blacks and whites could dance together and two gays could hold hands,” he says. “Everyone knew we were the liberal, accepting bar.” Anyone seen harassing nonwhite or LGBTQ customers would be bounced from the premises.
By the age of 23, when he got the brainwave to open a bar with his brother Ronald and his friend Steven Lindner, Bradford already had the mixed skillset necessary to make such a business successful. An Ellenville native, his acquaintance with the downtown New Paltz scene began, he admits, as an underage drinker of 16 or 17. While attending SUNY, he was working two jobs: as a prison guard at the Eastern Correctional Facility in Napanoch — good practice in defusing tense encounters between belligerent men — and as a checker in the bar at the Granit Hotel. “That was the reason I started Bacchus,” he says. “I priced everything that went out of that bar, and I realized what a profit alcohol was.”
The young would-be entrepreneurs did the homework for their business plan in an unconventional way: “Steven and I went to Buffalo and checked out all the bars, posing as reporters for Rolling Stone. He brought a camera and I carried a notebook. They told us everything we wanted to know about bars — all the dos and don’ts,” Bradford recalls.
Scouting around New Paltz for a likely site, they found the two-story brick LeFevre Building at 4 South Chestnut, built in 1894. In years past it had started out as a carpentry shop and gone through many commercial uses: as a dry goods store, a masonry shop, a millinery and dress shop, a tailor, a satellite location for New Paltz Normal School offices, a hand laundry for more than three decades, a taxi dispatcher and a barber shop. Most recently before it became Bacchus, it housed a short-lived operation called the New Paltz Artists’ Asylum: a coffeehouse that screened art films and hosted poetry readings. The not-for-profit collective that ran the Asylum quickly went broke, and the building’s owner was eager to do business with any tenant willing to put some sweat equity into renovation and maintenance of the rundown 1,200-square-foot space.
The trio leased the building in 1973, but quickly discovered that New York State was unwilling to grant a liquor license for use both upstairs and downstairs. Lindner and Ronald Bradford got cold feet at that point, so Wayne had to find another business partner with a few thousand dollars to invest. He found one in Bob Gorsline, whom Bradford describes as “a great guy — what a personality! But he was mechanically inept, so I had to do all the renovation myself.” Bradford hired a professional electrician, but persuaded his brother to teach him how to do plumbing; he built the furniture and patched up the brickwork himself.
Bacchus opened on April 13, 1974. After a year-and-a-half of ten-hour workdays, seven days a week, Gorsline wanted out, and the business was doing well enough for Bradford to buy out his share for $25,000. By 1978 he was in a position to buy the entire building.
In 1982, New York State raised the drinking age from 18 to 19, and Bradford saw the handwriting on the wall, correctly surmising that it would soon rise further. “I said to myself, ‘We’ve got to have a hook, and it’s not going to be liquor.’” So, he made an arrangement with Steve Axelson, chef/owner of the Gay Nineties at the time, to open a Mexican restaurant in the unused upstairs space. Thus did Bacchus survive and even continue to thrive when, in 1985, the drinking age was raised to 21 and all but six of New Paltz’s 33 bars went out of business.
Eventually that partnership ended and Bradford “reconfigured the kitchen” to broaden the menu. In the early 1990s he achieved his goal to expand the bottled beer list at Bacchus to 120; it’s now closer to 500. He brought two homebrewers, Jason Synan and Mike Renganeschi, on board in 2013. They launched Bacchus’ own brewing operation before heading out on their own in 2017 to found Hudson Valley Brewery in Beacon. Bacchus still bills itself as “the Hudson Valley’s original craft beer bar,” and continues to maintain a large off-premises brewery.
Other major changes over the years have included acquisition of the building next door to open a billiards hall in 2005 and construction of rear and front patios as additional dining spaces in the mid-2000s. Employee retention remains high, with veteran staff such as the lead bartender in place for as much as 20 years.
But it’s the “happy customers” who get most of the credit for Bacchus’ ongoing success, Bradford says. “We still have regulars who were here in 1974. Some come in every day.”
Celebrating 50 Years of Bacchus gets underway at noon on Sunday, April 14, with nostalgically low prices in effect until midnight. Regular hours of operation are from noon to 3 a.m. on Friday, noon to 2 a.m. on Saturday and noon to midnight Tuesday through Thursday and Sunday; closed on Mondays. For menus and more information, visit www.bacchusnewpaltz.com or www.facebook.com/bacchusnewpaltz.
Join the family! 
