Duff’s Brooklyn is a heavy metal bar at 168 Marcy Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City. Owned by Jimmy Duff, the bar is known for an extraordinary collection of heavy metal memorabilia covering virtually every available section of the walls and ceiling. Instruments, photographs, tour passes, records, posters and items donated by musicians share the room with coffins, skulls, weapons, an electric chair and other macabre decoration, giving Duff’s the character of both a dive bar and an unofficial heavy metal museum.
Jimmy Duff originally opened Bellevue Bar in Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, in 1999. He moved the business to Williamsburg in December 2004, reopening it as Duff’s Brooklyn at 28 North 3rd Street. Four years later, rising costs forced another move, and Duff’s reopened at its present Marcy Avenue location in December 2008. The larger premises allowed considerably more of Duff’s growing memorabilia collection to be displayed. The bar has since become a regular stop for musicians passing through New York, with members of bands including Iron Maiden, Pantera, Slayer, Celtic Frost, Exodus, Lamb of God, Machine Head, Suffocation, Watain and 1349 among its visitors.
Type O Negative has an especially strong presence at Duff’s. The Brooklyn band were regular visitors, and Peter Steele had a long friendship with Jimmy Duff. Among the most significant pieces of memorabilia is the enormous crucifix used in the original music video for “Christian Woman”. Peter Steele, Kenny Hickey and Johnny Kelly personally brought the cross to Duff’s in 2008 after the band decided to donate it to the bar. Duff’s also displays a custom-built replica of one of Steele’s distinctive black-and-green Washburn basses. The fully functional instrument was built to reproduce Steele’s original bass as closely as possible and was presented to Duff’s on Halloween 2014, with members of Steele’s family present for the occasion.
The Type O Negative connection has continued long after Steele’s death in 2010. Duff’s has held memorial events and annual Peter Steele tribute fundraisers, with proceeds donated to charity. The bar also hosted events connected with the band while Steele was still alive, including a release celebration for special editions of the final Type O Negative album, Dead Again, in 2008. Together with the “Christian Woman” cross, Steele bass replica and other photographs and memorabilia, the collection makes Duff’s one of the most significant surviving public locations connected with Type O Negative in Brooklyn.
The rest of the bar is equally dense with metal history. Memorabilia from decades of heavy and extreme metal fills the dark interior, while a metal-heavy jukebox provides the soundtrack. Duff’s has also maintained an annual Dimebag Darrell guitar raffle since the 2000s, raising money for music charities in memory of the Pantera guitarist. Jimmy Duff’s black hearse has itself become closely associated with the bar and its deliberately macabre image.
More than two decades after Duff first brought the bar to Brooklyn, Duff’s remains one of New York City’s best-known heavy metal drinking spots. Its importance comes as much from the collection accumulated inside as from the bar itself, with memorabilia donated by musicians and gathered over decades turning the small Williamsburg dive into a physical archive of New York and international metal history.
ADDRESS:
168 Marcy Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11211, USA
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