There’s a bar hidden inside the Columbus Circle subway station, and most of the people rushing past it every single day have no idea it exists.
Look for the red glow. Follow it down past the turnstiles, past the empanada stand and the donut cart, into the maze of Turnstyle Underground Market beneath 59th Street. There — in a former taco spot still half-signed as “Gotham Taco” — is Siberia Bar: eight barstools, a jukebox bleeding classic rock, and Tracy Westmoreland’s grin waiting to welcome you back. Or for the first time.
Siberia has been a ghost story in New York for nearly two decades. Those old enough to remember will tell you about the original location — a bar carved into the dead space alongside the subway tracks at 50th and Broadway, opened in 1996, equal parts legendary and disreputable. Conan O’Brien drank there. The Coen Brothers drank there. Anthony Bourdain drank there. It was where hipster New York, famous New York, and broke-but-interesting New York collapsed into the same barstools.
Then the Rockefeller Group wanted the lease back. In protest, Westmoreland chained himself to a toilet bowl outside Mitsubishi’s Tokyo headquarters. You cannot make this up. He lost anyway.
The bar moved to Hell’s Kitchen, survived another few years, then closed in 2007. For seventeen years, Siberia existed only in the amber-lit memories of people who swore the city used to be more interesting.
Then, quietly, in September 2025, it came back.
No press release. No Instagram announcement with a soft launch party. Just red light bleeding under a sign still bearing the old tenant’s name, and word spreading the way word used to spread in New York — through someone telling someone else over a drink.
The new Siberia is compact in the best possible way. Eight stools. A bar slim enough that the person next to you will become your friend, or your enemy, within twenty minutes. The jukebox still runs. The drinks cost about a dollar less than anywhere else in this neighborhood, a hold-the-line-against-gentrification gesture that feels almost political coming from a bar that already fought Rockefeller Group and lived to tell it.
What makes it hidden isn’t just geography — it’s that Turnstyle is one of those New York places that feels like it exists inside the city’s walls rather than on its face. You access the market by descending into the subway at any corner of 57th and 58th Street at 8th Avenue. You don’t need a MetroCard. You don’t need to know the right password. You just have to know to go down instead of up.
The atmosphere underground is warm in the way old New York bars were warm — not curated warmth, not warm-lighting-on-exposed-brick warmth, but the warmth of a place that doesn’t care if you Instagrammed it. Westmoreland built this bar three times. He knows what a bar is supposed to be.
How to Visit
Address: Turnstyle Underground Market, inside Columbus Circle station (enter via 57th & 58th St. at 8th Ave.)
Subway: A, B, C, D, 1 to 59th St–Columbus Circle
Hours: Evenings until 4 a.m., six nights a week
Cost: Cash only; drinks priced below neighborhood average
Access: No MetroCard needed — enter Turnstyle from street level
Insider Tip
The signage still says “Gotham Taco” on the outside. Don’t be confused. Follow the red light. That’s how you know you’re in the right place — and that you’ve found something the crowds rushing through the turnstiles will never see.
