A pagoda-style ornament on the corner and the remaining signs of a shutdown bar are the last signs of a city centre building's past life.
Purpose built as a garage with showrooms on a long-vacant plot in the 1920s, 27-31 Berry Street spent roughly 40 years as a car dealership as part of A. W. Webb Ltd., which also had a dealership on Jamaica Street. Large windows on the ground floor would normally invite you to look inside at what was on offer, but they're boarded up now, with event posters plastered on top.
In recent years, the two-story building with a flat roof has housed a string of short-lived businesses gone before they've left a mark. Until the 1980s, a Chinese restaurant called Far East served Cantonese and Peking style food, and banquets costing £9 per person. For decades, the building just a few hundred feet from Chinatown continued to host Chinese restaurants, including both New China and China Palace simultaneously.
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You can still see New China's decorative features through the upstairs windows, despite it being closed for half a decade. Eventually that era ended as Rack and Dollar took off. The American sports bar was kitted out with pool tables and 30 TV screens, and offered "ridiculous eating challenges" with a menu of stacked burgers and barbecue ribs.
Celebrities like Steven Gerrard and John Bishop even visited for a game of pool, and it was named one of the top five sports bars in the UK to watch the 2016 Euros. But it was gone after a couple of years, replaced after only a few weeks by Berry Street Bar and Kitchen and a cocktail lounge called Elixir on late 2017.
Berry Street Bar was a gastropub with live music, live sport and those big TV screens still in place, while Elixir sold itself as a 'London Soho' establishment with a tranquil feel and a cocktail menu designed on the history and search for the elixir of eternal life.
The bar became another sports bar called The Dutch, but almost as if the building was cursed, it lay dim and shuttered after a couple of years. Now it's largely dormant on a street that's seen several new additions, like Korean restaurant Moiim Deli and a bar called River North last year, as well as sudden closures like Vietnom this summer.
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