Inside the final days of the famous bar – and what’s next for the family behind it.
News that Charlie’s Bar was closing spread the old-fashioned way, through word of mouth – Karangahape Road is kind of like that. It spread fast and far enough that by its final day of service, the bar was packed with regulars and relics. Some drove all the way from Nelson, Tauranga and Whangārei for one last night out.
Co-manager Alicia Hola wasn’t expecting such a massive turnout. “We honestly didn’t think it would be that big,” she said when The Spinoff stopped by the bar two days later. “I was so overwhelmed.” They opened at 8pm, and within 20 minutes people had started turning up. Karaoke kicked off almost immediately and ran right up until 4 in the morning when they shut the doors. Trade was flat out, to the point that the bar pretty much ran dry. “They drank everything,” Alicia’s sister Nia said. Their dad, Siale “Charlie” Hola, who started the place, learned a lesson, even after all these years: “If you’re finishing up, you’ve got to order more stock.”
There was still some golden confetti from closing night strewn behind the bar as the family packed up the business this week. The bar itself is made from macrocarpa, and Charlie wants to keep it. The balloons were still up too, even as more permanent fixtures were being pulled out. Dark, disembowelled pokie machines sat in the back waiting for the removal truck. A cluster of disco balls clung to the ceiling above all the bustling high-vis workers. There were trays of clean glass tumblers, odds and ends tidied away into boxes, dregs of spirits in bottles waiting to be lugged away and beer mats hanging neatly on the gate to the bar.
The beginning of the end came back in October. “We were supposed to be here three more years,” Charlie explained. But with revenue not as strong as it needed to be, the bar short-staffed and the neighbourhood changing, he made the call to pull the plug. The landlord, Samson Corporation, accepted their request for early release from the lease. They began sharing the news around November-December, informing friends and regulars of the decision. “We could have announced it sooner, but I think I wasn’t ready,” said Alicia.
“It was all word of mouth,” said Nia. No posters, no marketing. “We don’t even have a social media account.” Instead it was some of the regulars – artists and musicians with sizeable online audiences – who helped spread the news. “That’s how I was able to get the word out,” Alicia explained. “I didn’t realise that a lot of them had a huge following… they shared it just out of pure love for Charlie’s.”
The bar’s community was gutted. “There were a lot of tears,” said Alicia. “Especially from the regulars from Dad’s time.” Charlie opened the business in 2009, but people in the neighbourhood already knew him from his tenure across the road at The Rising Sun. He worked at that bar for 21 years before he saw an opportunity in the space across the road. “I said to myself, I’ll buy that bar,” he remembered. “I just wanted to do something for myself and my family.” When he looks back now at what they have, it all comes from Charlie’s Bar. “That was the start, that was the beginning.”
A photo album sat on the bar as the family cleared the place out, with the first page showing the first jug they ever poured there. A lot has changed since then – that jug would have cost around $7.90; now it’s $20 (the bar had Export on tap and “Charlie’s Draught”, which is actually Tui). The place evolved over the years too. Alicia came to work there in 2009 and sister Nia joined a year later; by 2013 the pair were managing the place. “In the beginning, Charlie’s was more of a ‘Poly bar’,” said Alicia. You would rarely see white people come in.” But when they introduced the karaoke machine, the mix started changing. One day the police came in and, seeing a Pākehā group flipping through the song folder, asked if they were lost. “They’re here for the karaoke,” Nia told them. She cracks up about it now. “That was back then, now it’s different.”
Karaoke helped give the bar its vibe and made it a destination. Unlike the new generation of song booth parlours and private rooms, Charlie’s was old school – one of the few places you could go in Tāmaki Makaurau to sing in a crowded bar to a forgiving audience, with a drink or two under your belt for courage. The most popular songs – the bangers – were ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, ‘Teenage Dirtbag’, ‘Sweet Caroline’, ‘Dancing in the Dark’ and ‘Wicked Game’; they’d get the whole bar singing.
Karaoke drew an eclectic clientele to Charlie’s. Stop by on a Saturday night and you might see artists and musicians rubbing shoulders with fellow Aucklanders from a different milieu, some who’d seen hard times or lived hard. The bar served the queer community, creatives, bohemians, “hippies” as well as people for whom the chips were down. “It’s a huge mix,” Alicia said. “You get literally everybody, the young, the old; there’s no specific age group.”
One regularly, Scotty – “The Pirate of Charlie’s Bar” – could be seen, with his distinctive beard and waistcoat, posted up at the front window of the bar most days. Their regulars were loyal, particularly the older patrons. “A lot of them don’t go anywhere else,” Alicia explained. “They’re comfortable coming to the bar, sitting with us and having a chat,” she said. “We just let them be, I think that’s why they’re so comfortable, because we let a lot of people just come and be.”
Working at Charlie’s has been a lesson in empathy, Alicia said. “When you hear the stories, especially from the homeless, a lot of them struggle with mental health … But when you give them some space to talk about it, and they open up and tell us their stories, then you understand why they’re going through what they’re going through.” It’s why they were OK with anyone – as long as they weren’t causing harm to anybody else – coming into the bar and didn’t hold judgement. “They’re not causing me trouble, they’re completely fine. It doesn’t look pretty, but we’ve never been about that. We’re an unpretentious type of bar. Come as you are.”
No more customers are coming through the doors now, just movers and people helping with the pack-down before the January 31 deadline. And the family. It’s surreal leaving; Karangahape Road has been their home, Charlie explained, for nearly 40 years. “We’ll always come back here.”
“We’ve been good to K Road and K Road has been good to us,” said Alicia. They’ll be taking some of the bar’s famous fixtures with them to the Star Hotel in Ōtāhuhu – the family’s other business – including the pool table and karaoke machine. She and Nia will go there too, joining their dad on a more forgiving roster: more time off, earlier closes. (In recent years, the sisters have split the burden of working 12pm-4am, Monday to Saturday; in the early days Charlie would open the bar from 9am and be there seven days a week.)
They hope some of their regulars will relocate too. “It’s really the customers that made Charlie’s what it is,” she said. The family was there to run the place and make people comfortable, but it was the clientele that did the rest. “They have no idea how good they made it.”
