Commuters crossing the rebuilt LIRR concourse at Penn Station have spent the past few years doing something that used to be unthinkable down there: looking up. The corridor is nearly twice as wide as it was and the ceilings, once low enough to graze a tall man’s hair, now reach 18 feet. But the most satisfying sight sits at eye level, tucked behind the escalator to Seventh Avenue and 33rd Street, a few steps from Tracks 18 and 19. Tracks, the raw bar that poured Guinness for the 6:27 crowd for 16 years, is finally open again.
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Bruce Caulfield debuted the bar back in January of 2003, in the old McCann’s space he won at bid the year before, after running a coffee shop in the station for 13 years. In 2019, the MTA’s concourse overhaul evicted it along with nine other businesses, and the last pint was poured on August 31 of that year. Caulfield moved above ground to 220 West 31st Street, across from Madison Square Garden, and never stopped saying he’d be back. The bar soft-opened in its old station corner on August 8, and on September 17 a priest from St. Francis of Assisi blessed the taps while MTA chair Janno Lieber raised a pint.
“I don’t believe in coincidences, and I always said I’m coming back,” Caulfield says. His original partners didn’t follow him. “They said they didn’t want to go through the expense and I think just the aggravation of building a new space and all the bureaucracy. And I said was ‘Well, I’m doing it.’” So he found new backers for his revamped station bar while the 31st Street spot now belongs to his former partners, the O’Brien brothers, as O’Brien’s, a sports bar.…