BETHEL — A pickup truck smashed into the side of Babes Bar on Saturday, cracking the brick exterior, destroying the building’s wooden fire escape and forcing the tavern to close until the damage can be assessed and repaired, Babes Bar’s owners said in a social media post.
A driver of the pickup was heading south on Main Street in Bethel at around 12:15 p.m. when it hit one vehicle and clipped another before running head-on into Babes Bar, according to owners Owen Daniel-McCarter and Jesse Plotsky, who posted an account and photos of the incident on Facebook.
The impact with the side of the historic former train station caused sections of brick to shift and line fractures up two sides of the building in addition to crushing the lower portion of the exterior fire escape, photos show. Inside the building, one-third of the bar’s liquor bottles and glassware also shattered and a keg was blown, resulting in a “sea of beer” on the floor that leaked into the basement, the owners said in a phone interview Monday.
No one was inside the building at the time — the bar was scheduled to open at 2 p.m. — and Plotsky, who was in a meeting in the nearby Arnold Block at the time of the accident and heard the crash, said none of the drivers appeared to suffer major injuries.
Plotsky said that a structural engineer was scheduled to visit on Monday to assess the damage and the extent of repairs that will be required. “If it’s just cosmetic, we could have the fire escape rebuilt and be reopened by next week. But if it’s structural then we are more looking at the middle of winter,” Daniel-McCarter said.
Plotsky and Daniel-McCarter opened Babes Bar in the former Bethel train depot building in 2018. The bar was closed for 15 months from March 2020 to May 2021, because of the coronavirus pandemic.
CORRECTION: Babes Bar is in Bethel. A previous version of this story included an incorrect location.
