Those New Yorkers who treasure the city's links with its seedier past are lamenting the death of another rough-and-ready Manhattan institution, driven out by ever-soaring property prices.
The Hogs and Heifers country and western-themed honky-tonk bar, its walls and ceilings lined with bras contributed by female patrons, was the last hold-out from an earlier era in the Meatpacking District.
The area is now the definition of gentrification and hipsterdom, with designer clothes stores and swanky clubs pushing out dive bars and 24-hour diners. A few of the slaughterhouse firms after which the district is named remain, where workers in bloodied smocks load carcasses into refrigerated trucks at dawn, but their numbers are dwindling fast.
Back in 1992, when Hogs and Heifers opened, the bar's rent was US$3,000 ($4,548) a month. Paul McCartney, Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt were among the host of celebrity guests at the raucous locale (and Roberts famously was among those who left her bra behind).