42nd Street Oyster Bar, one of Raleigh’s signature restaurants, will close. Here are the details
The neon lights at one of downtown Raleigh’s signature restaurants will soon go dark.
The 42nd Street Oyster Bar will close this month after nearly 40 years in business. The last day of service will be March 30, according to an employee working in the restaurant Friday night.
The closing comes after the restaurant declined to sign a new five-year lease, co-owner Brad Hurley said in a phone interview.
“The timing for us to renew was just not in the cards for us,” Hurley said. “Downtown Raleigh, with all these high rises, is changing pretty doggone fast.”
While its history stretches back nearly a century, The 42nd Street Oyster Bar as we know it was opened in 1987 by the late Thad Eure, Jr., the co-founder of the Angus Barn steakhouse. That history includes its founding in 1931 as a grocery store, oyster bar and eventually as a ramshackle bar called the 42nd Street Tavern.
Eure knocked down the former tavern building in the mid-1980s and in its place built 42nd Street Oyster bar as a kind of art deco dream lined with neon.
Since it opened, 42nd Steet has seemed timeless, casual but upscale, a destination for oysters by the half-shell as well as perfectly fried Calabash seafood and buttery crab. The dining room is streaked with neon and its bar stools are coveted perches to slurp oysters and sip cocktails.
Greg Cox, former dining critic for The News & Observer, named 42nd Street as one of Raleigh’s “essential” restaurants, noting how its dining room was stitched into the fabric of the community.
“A pair of stainless steel art deco entry doors set a nostalgic mood for a dining room with linoleum tile floors, vintage jazz, mounted trophy fish, and a collection of license plates donated by generations of local politicians,” Cox wrote in 2020.
For many years now, 42nd Street has been owned an operated by John Vick and Brad Hurley, who helped open the restaurant and purchased it after Eure’s passing in 1988.
“We had a really good run, great clientele and some really sharp people serving and doing the cooking for people,” Hurley said.
This story was originally published March 7, 2025 at 8:51 PM with the headline "42nd Street Oyster Bar, one of Raleigh’s signature restaurants, will close. Here are the details."
