South Village preservation plan eyes gay history

Map showing the boundaries of the proposed South Village Historic District

By Paul Schindler

“Witness the Scenes in ‘the Slide’ as the Herald Describes Them to You, and Straightway Begin Your Work of Reform.”

So read a sub-headline in a crusading piece of New York Herald reporting on January 5, 1892, as reported in George Chauncey’s acclaimed 1994 history, “Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940.”

The Herald exposé called readers’ attention to what it described as a “depravity unknown in the lowest slums of London or Paris” — a basement club located at 157 Bleecker St. near Thompson St., two blocks below Washington Square Park, in the heart of the South Village. The establishment catered to “pansies,” effeminate men whose faces were often “rouged up” and who counted on more butch types — mostly single men, many of them working-class — to buy them drinks and perhaps even pay them for sex. In a reversal of the way in which the commerce runs in today’s gay slang, the macho partner was sometimes known as “trade.”

The Slide, dubbed by the Press, another Gotham newspaper of the day, as the “wickedest place in New York,” was indeed the most disreputable of the turn-of-the-century establishments we would now call gay, but it was not the only one. In the area that runs up from Bleecker to West Third Sts., from Sixth Ave. to as far east as Broadway, historians as well as tales passed down from one generation to the next document a vibrant outcropping of establishments that served men and women who enjoyed same-sex desire, including cheap restaurants, saloons and tea rooms. These sat nearby brothels of a more traditional kind, as well as Catholic churches that served the neighborhood’s emerging working-class Italian-American community.

This — and more — is part of the rich cultural stew brought together and to light in an 82-page report released three weeks ago by the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation and authored by Columbia University architectural historian Andrew S. Dolkart.

Left, this building at 157 Bleecker Street near Thompson housed the notorious Slide, a basement club for homosexual assignations that the New York Herald charged was filled with “depravity unknown in the lowest slums of London or Paris.” The establishment also drew unfavorable attention from the police. Right, this block of MacDougal, between Bleecker and West Third, was once in the heart of a wide-open district full of brothels and pansy bars.

The report was presented to Robert Tierney, the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission (LPC), the city agency that oversees the designation of buildings, blocks and neighborhoods worthy of protection against adverse development. The commission has created more than 80 such districts citywide, and GVSHP is seeking approval for a South Village Historic District comprising 40 blocks and roughly 800 buildings.

If approved, the district would run from the West Fourth St. southern boundary of Washington Square Park as far south as Watts St., and from Sixth Ave., and in places Seventh, east to West Broadway and LaGuardia Place.

Noting in the report’s introduction that “Greenwich Village, one of New York’s and the world’s most venerable and beloved neighborhoods, owes much of its continuing appeal to its well-preserved architecture, its palpable sense of history, its charm and its human scale,” GVSHP Executive Director Andrew Berman warns that the South Village’s “historic buildings could be lost at any time.”

Fortunately, major portions of Greenwich Village have been protected since 1969, when the LPC created the city’s first “truly large-scale neighborhood historic district,” in Berman’s words. Since then, additional portions of the Village have also won protection, most recently last year, when the Weehawken Street Historic District was created in a relatively compact area running north and east from the corner of Christopher and West Sts., another area of critical historical significance for the LGBT community.

But Berman also mentions an important incongruity: that the area immediately south of Washington Square Park, the West Village’s only significant parkland except for the Hudson Riverfront, has been continually omitted from preservation districts.

The reason, according to Berman, is the working-class architecture pervading the area.

“While the genteel townhouses and picturesque cul-de-sacs of the West Village were considered the stuff of historic preservation in the 1960s,” Berman continues in the report’s introduction, “working-class architecture, consisting of tenements and converted rowhouses, were not considered by most to be worthy of preservation, nor was immigrant and ethnic history yet deemed worthy of recognition.”

Dolkart’s report supports this assertion, documenting as it does “old law” dumbbell tenements and the endless variety of ornamental cornices and pedimented cast-iron window lintels on the upper floors of modest rowhouses and walk-ups.

Meanwhile, the fact that Berman and Dolkart are out gay men means that the report sensitively addresses the neighborhood’s significance in the history of New York’s gay community and draws wisely on the work of scholars such as Chauncey and cultural historian Steven Watson in framing its discussion.

That early gay and lesbian establishments of high and low brow, as well as other rowdy and transgressive locales, co-existed with a thriving Italian-American Catholic community may seem surprising, even if one allows for New York’s tradition of tolerating differences. Indeed, Dolkart’s survey discusses a series of “dives where men and women of the lowest order are received as welcome guests,” one of which was next door to St. Benedict’s Roman Catholic Church.

But according to Chauncey, working-class communities of the era were often stubbornly resistant to middle-class Victorian attitudes about public propriety. Locales that permitted gay expression throughout the city — whether the Tenderloin district that ran up Sixth and Seventh Aves. from 23rd to 40th St., or the Bowery — were located in working-class neighborhoods, and many of the “trade” who frequented pansy bars came from a working-class background. Often they were young men without the means to marry or, in many cases, immigrants who arrived in New York alone.

By the early-20th century, the dives of the 1800s were supplemented by an array of establishments probably more recognizable to the modern gay eye. Gay speakeasies arose and in many cases survived for decades, and institutions that would grow to have important influence in the development of modern gay culture — such as the Provincetown Playhouse, on MacDougal Street — emerged.

By 1925, at the northwest corner of Bleecker and MacDougal Sts., the neighborhood supported a tonier watering hole, the San Remo, that for decades drew what Watson has called “the younger generation of bohemians,” a group that could also be thought of as perhaps proto-metrosexuals — including Merce Cunningham, John Cage, Frank O’Hara, Larry Rivers, Gore Vidal, Dorothy Day, Miles Davis, Jackson Pollack, James Agee and Jack Kerouac.

And by 1958, a new generation of gay New Yorkers was at it, this time at 31 Carmine St., with the establishment of Café Cino, a coffee house that Dolkart writes “became the birthplace of the Off-Off-Broadway theater movement.” There were young gay dramatists, including William Hoffman, Robert Patrick, Doric Wilson and Lanford Wilson, along with what Patrick, in an interview with On the Purple Circuit’s Michael Dale, described as “the odd straight playwrights like John Guare [and] Sam Shepard.”

These details — and many more — constitute the report that GVSHP submitted to Landmarks, which may take as long as it likes to respond. If a historic preservation designation is in the cards, public hearings will be held, at which time both supporters and critics will make their case.

Berman is not sure what kind of resistance his proposal will meet, but he said that, since current zoning regulations in the neighborhood already bar unusually large-scale developments, it shouldn’t take any planned projects “off the table.” He also pointed to an advisory board that includes scholars, block-association leaders, co-op boards and other individual property owners, business proprietors and major community institutions such as the Greenwich Village Community Task Force, SoHo Alliance and Film Forum.

Perhaps most significant, though, is the posture of what Berman called “the elephant in the room.” NYU, arguably the single most influential developer in the Village in recent decades, has “pledged to support this,” he said.