The Bush

The Bush opened on Troutman Street in April 2023 with one very specific complaint behind it. "There wasn't any place where we could get a cocktail and also go dance and cruise," co-founder Nikke Alleyne told Time Out New York. Her business partner Justine LaViolette put the mission statement even more plainly to the same outlet: "Literally, we wanted people to come and make out." The two met at Misster, the lesbian night at The Woods, and spent about six years dreaming up the room before they built it.

What they built is a bar with a job to do. The front is a narrow bar — cocktails, a wall of bottles, the usual — and it opens straight into a real dance floor at the back, low-lit, hung with a constellation of disco balls under purple light. The Infatuation calls it "barebones" in the good sense: nothing about the room is trying to be a lifestyle brand, it's trying to hold a crowd.

A week that isn't just Friday and Saturday

The specials tell you who this bar is actually for. Martini Tuesdays run $12 martinis and cosmos; Slutty Punch Wednesdays pour an $8 cup of a seasonal punch; Sunday afternoons settle into $6 mimosas and $20 carafes. None of that is a happy-hour gimmick bolted onto a club — it's a bar that wants a reason for someone to walk in on a Tuesday, not just a Saturday.

That's deliberate. "If the community wants longevity in this business, we need support not just on Friday and Saturday," Alleyne told Time Out, and the programming backs it up: monthly Dyke Drag, karaoke nights, trivia, watch parties, comedy shows and book events run alongside the DJ-driven weekend crowd. Wine Enthusiast's reporting on the opening noted the founders built the space with explicit intention to center queer people of color — not an afterthought bolted onto the marketing, but a stated design choice from before the doors opened.

Why one more lesbian bar is actually news

The context makes The Bush more than a nice new bar. The US has roughly 32 lesbian bars left, down from around 200 in the 1980s — a number Time Out's reporting cites directly when it frames The Bush as part of a real, if small, renaissance rather than a one-off opening. Bushwick already had queer nightlife institutions like the Bush's own alma mater, The Woods; what it hadn't had was a room built specifically as a lesbian bar with its own dance floor, rather than one queer night borrowed inside someone else's space.

Yelp reviewers consistently flag the staff — "wonderful, knowledgeable, charismatic" comes up more than once — and the drink pricing as reasonable for the neighborhood. The bar is open Tuesday through Sunday, closed Mondays, with hours running later on weekends (into 4am Friday and Saturday) than the early-week schedule.

The Bush sits a short walk from Maria Hernandez Park, on the same stretch of Bushwick that's carried queer nightlife history for over a decade — worth pairing with a slower afternoon in the neighborhood before the room fills up for the night.