Tracy Westmoreland behind the bar at Siberia.

O n Halloween, in 1996, Tracy Westmoreland opened Siberia, his bar in the subway station at Broadway and 50th Street. Back then the news was occupied with the presidential race between incumbent Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, kids were ensorcelled by a new dance craze called "The Macarena," and "The Unabomber," Ted Kaczynski, had finally been identified and then arrested by the FBI somewhere in the mountains of Montana. Twenty-nine years later, in 2025, when Westmoreland re-opened Siberia in the subway station at Columbus Circle, New York was buzzing with the upcoming mayoral race between Andrew Cuomo and Zohran Mamdani, the streets of Manhattan were peppered with kids recording TikToks, and the assassination of pundit Charlie Kirk splintered the nation's psyche into rage or absurdity. A lot has changed, but a lot has also stayed the same. Westmoreland himself included.

Westmoreland and Botero in the Columbus Circle Mall.

A bastion of dive bar culture in New York, Siberia was welcomed back into the subway system with open arms. “It will become more Siberian as it gets lived in and time goes by,” Westmoreland, who famously chained himself to a toilet in 2001 outside of the Mitsubishi offices in Tokyo to protest losing his lease, told Grub Street a year ago when it re-opened. I’ve witnessed just that: Late this summer, I wrote about the creepy art installation hidden behind Siberia’s photo booth, and last Sunday, I attended their inaugural “Lasagna Night,” the first time the bar has ever served food, hosted by an old regular named Erik Liljegren, a former Fox News correspondent in the late ‘90s and early 2000s who now holds court behind the bar. 

To ring in the anniversary, I sat down with Westmoreland for a seafood tower and champagne at Bad Roman, a restaurant that he clarified to me was “on the surface” (meaning not hidden within the MTA system). There, he told me about a number of things, including his nine years of lifeguarding out at Rockaway Beach, during which he says he saved 72 lives, his walk-on role in the 2007 movie Across the Universe, and being invited over to Donald Trump’s house. He got teary-eyed talking about his old friend Anthony Bourdain, and about how he meets too many young people who don’t know how to say “excuse me.” But mostly, he talked about Siberia, and what it means to run a bar in New York City for as long as he has. Below is that conversation, edited and condensed for clarity. Load up a shot of Popov and dive in. 

Tomorrow is 30 years since you opened Siberia. In 2007, it closed, and didn’t re-open until September of 2025. What were you up to during that period of time?

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