Achilles Heel Closes Suddenly in Greenpoint as Union Drive Raises Eyebrows and Funds

The sudden shuttering of a well-loved Brooklyn bar hints at pressures facing labour, small business, and workers’ rights in New York’s churning hospitality sector.

On a chilly Sunday this February, regulars flocked one last time to Achilles Heel, a Greenpoint stalwart, for a cocktail and a sense of closure. The bar’s abrupt exit from West Street, after thirteen years, is not in itself strange; eateries and watering holes are notoriously fragile in New York. But the timing, and whispers about the cause, portend tensions simmering beneath the city’s booming restaurant renaissance.

Achilles Heel’s closing, announced by its owner the Marlow Collective via Instagram on February 9th, raised few initial eyebrows. The statement cited “a protracted period of financial hardship,” a staple explanation in hospitality circles. Yet by morning, online speculation spiked as soon as details of a workplace unionization effort emerged. Within hours, the bar’s social media feeds were flooded with accusations that efforts to organize precipitated the closure—allegations made sharper when Achilles Heel disabled Instagram comments.

According to accounts from employees, the entire staff informed management of their plans to unionize on Friday, February 6th, seeking nothing more radical than a seat at the bargaining table. By Sunday night, they were all out of work, their employer permanently shuttered. A GoFundMe set up by the now-jobless bar staff evokes the human cost: as of publication, the campaign had raised $5,531 toward a $14,000 goal to tide them over.

For Greenpoint, and New York more widely, the incident is telling. Restaurant jobs remain a major segment of city employment—about 310,000 New Yorkers worked in eateries and bars as of 2023, according to the Department of Labour. Even flagship venues under seasoned management face punishing rents, fickle foot traffic, and escalating wage demands. Adding potential legal wrangling over unionization rights and severance could tip even a solvent operator into retreat.

This is no isolated story. New York’s hospitality scene is sprouting new branches (a delayed Chipotle outpost is reportedly about to open nearby), but closures and labour disputes abound. The city’s cost of living, especially in gentrifying quarters like North Brooklyn, is unkind to both staff and owners. The failed dialogue at Achilles Heel stands in contrast to its sibling bakery, She Wolf, which successfully unionized some years earlier with no apparent fallout.

Second-order effects abound. New Yorkers have gained a taste for fairer wages and stable schedules since the pandemic, and worker-led action appears buoyant. Yet the thin margins of small businesses leave little room for error. The closure of a beloved bar after such a unionization gambit risks chilling similar efforts elsewhere, as owners may read it as a cautionary tale: collective bargaining talk might be the last straw, not the first in a new contract.

Legal uncertainties muddy the water. Federal law bars employers from firing staff for union activity or closing shop in retaliation—but enforcement often lags, and proving intent is fraught. City politicians have crowded into photo-ops at pro-labour rallies, but the regulatory state’s effect on actual job security is puny at best. The National Labour Relations Board’s attention may be drawn, but it offers cold comfort to bills unpaid in the meantime.

Nationally, the scene is more mixed. High-profile wins for unions at Starbucks and Amazon have emboldened some, while other efforts have foundered. In liberal bastions like New York, public opinion often sides with workers. But a patchwork of regulations, litigious landlords, and acute competition bedevil organisers. When small venues close, their demise rarely makes headlines outside the city—save as a datapoint in broader debates about the future of urban work.

Labour’s fragile gains in a shifting city

Still, New York’s hospitality workforce is unlikely to give up easily. The return of tourists and the resilience of nightlife have kept the sector afloat, though not without casualties. Statewide, union membership has edged up, from 22% of workers in 2021 to 24% last year, partly due to militant drives in food service. But for every union secured, another Achilles Heel slips away in the night.

The lesson, perhaps, is that neither side holds a trump card. Staff can organize (and often do so with some success), but a shot at a pay raise or sick leave may prove pyrrhic if an employer simply folds. For owners, citing “viability” as the motive for closure glosses over any deeper antagonism toward collective bargaining, but the optics are rarely flattering.

As ever, the city muddles through—not so much by grand design as by the messy push and pull of interests. Each closing or opening exposes frailty in the local economic ecosystem. Chipotle may yet thrive where Achilles Heel faltered—chain resilience proving again that scale insulates corporate ventures from the buffeting winds that lay low the independent.

Does the ripple of Greenpoint’s latest bar closure foreshadow something larger for New York? We reckon it underscores the precarious balance at which labour activism and owner survival coexist. The arc of hospitality in New York bends long—toward adaptation and attrition, discovery and disappearance, with luck playing a role only slightly less than grit.

As for the bar’s erstwhile staff, they now join the ranks of those shuffled by the city’s ceaseless churn. In economic terms, their union push will be read by some as quixotic, by others as gutsy, and by most as business as usual in a town where few jobs promise permanence. But New York endures, its appetite for risk mirrored by both entrepreneurs and employees.

Greenpoint residents will, as ever, find new places to gather and drink. But the memory of Achilles Heel—its sudden end, its cause both mundane and incendiary—remains a sign of the city’s restless striving, its appetite for both solidarity and reinvention. ■