How a Coffin Factory Becomes a Bar Name
The bar opened in October 2010, founded by three co-owners — Colin Peer, Heather Rush, and Jeff Rush — all working musicians who had spent years bartending and playing around the city before deciding to open their own place. Jeff Rush's original name for it was "Quatarolla's." Colin Peer vetoed it immediately: the name was, he said, "totally ungoogleable." The building they had leased was a former casket factory, and they were planning to host live music. Pine Box Rock Shop, Peer noted, "just made a lot of sense."
This is how the best bar names work — not from branding sessions but from the logic of the space talking back to the people occupying it. The pine box as object has been carrying centuries of particular weight. Add a rock shop and the pun operates quietly, without announcing itself at the door.
The Engineering of the Room
The practical problem of adapting a casket factory for a bar produced some genuinely interesting furniture. Rusted, bisected oil drums were cut lengthwise and mounted low to the floor as tables. The ribs of wooden shipping pallets were stripped and used as wall paneling. The result reads as DIY but holds together with the logic of found objects used precisely — every material came from somewhere identifiable, and the somewhere is still legible in the room.
The factory ceiling is the other element. High enough to give the space natural reverb, it's the kind of architectural accident that newer bars across Bushwick spend considerable sums trying to approximate. At Pine Box it arrived with the lease in 2010, with no additional work required.
What's Under the Bar Top
The plexiglass counter has vintage concert ticket stubs embedded beneath it — dozens of them, overlapping at angles, faded rectangles from shows that happened in this city and mostly didn't survive the decades intact. There's a Patti Smith ticket from 2001 somewhere in the collection. It is the kind of thing you locate on a slow night when the conversation has found its rhythm and you're not quite ready to leave yet.
The ticket stubs are where Pine Box gets specific enough to separate itself from the industrial-warehouse bar category it technically belongs to. Most places in that category deploy salvage as identity. Here salvage is a fact, and the Patti Smith ticket is the detail that makes the fact precise.
The Vegan Bar Thing
Pine Box is a vegan bar, which is not how it would introduce itself but is accurate. Vegan pizza comes out of the kitchen late. The cocktails are built without animal products. The draft list rotates through Brooklyn and regional breweries. This matters if you're vegan and looking for a functioning late-night bar in Bushwick with actual food — a narrower window than it sounds, and Pine Box handles it better than most.
For the rest of the room, the vegan designation is one feature among several rather than the organizing logic. The same space also runs Wednesday trivia at 8:30pm, Thursday Mixtape Bingo at 8pm, and Saturday karaoke at 11pm. None of these things undermine each other. The bar is large enough that they coexist without irony.
The Back Room Before the Band
The back section of Pine Box is where live music happens — indie rock mostly, with occasional genre drift in either direction. The stage is modest, the sound managed by the factory ceiling, and the bands playing here are generally early enough in their trajectories that performing at Pine Box still registers as meaningful.
On Wednesday evenings before 10pm, the back room sits at a particular moment of overlap: trivia is running near the front, the band is setting up but hasn't started, and the bar has filled to a comfortable density without yet reaching the point where conversation requires effort. That hour is the one worth targeting.
Practical notes
- Address: 12 Grattan St, Brooklyn, NY 11206 (Bushwick)
- Hours: Mon–Thu 4pm–2am; Fri 4pm–4am; Sat–Sun 2pm–4am
- Getting there: Morgan Ave L train, 2-minute walk; J/Z to Myrtle–Broadway (10-min walk)
- Go for: Rotating local drafts, vegan cocktails, and late-night vegan pizza
- Best window: Wednesday before 10pm — trivia in session, band setting up, bar at comfortable density
- What to do after: Continue east on Grattan toward Wyckoff Ave for the next bar; or head back to the Morgan L
The Point
The casket factory joke wrote itself in 2010 and has been running ever since. What keeps Pine Box working isn't the punchline — it's that the room earned its character by accident, through fifteen years and three musicians who needed somewhere to play and drink after their own shows. The oil drums are still on the floor. The Patti Smith ticket is still under the bar top. The band is still setting up in the back. None of it has anywhere else to be.
Tags: #pineboxrockshop #casketfactorybar #bushwickbar #craftbeer #veganbar #bushwickbrooklyn #brooklynbars #nycnightlife #industrialbar #brooklynlivemusic #theoddedit #adaptivereuse #slownight #nycunderground #foundobjectdesign
Sources consulted: bushwickdaily.com · theinfatuation.com · timeout.com · pineboxrockshop.com
All trademarks are the property of their respective owners.
Please drink responsibly. Must be of legal drinking age.
