From Gilded Age beer garden to 1970s strip club: 100 years of vice on a Chelsea corner

There’s a four-story tenement on the traffic-choked corner of Sixth Avenue and 24th Street with some curious signage.

Not the store sign for a now-shuttered ground floor cafe, nor the enormous “for sale” banner spread across the second floor of the facade. (Yikes, is this red-brick beauty in danger?) Signage that’s much more intriguing comes into view when you stand nearby and look up.

On the corner of the building, two brownstone nameplates say, well, “The Corner,” in Victorian-style lettering. Above the cornice is a pediment that reads “The Corner” with “Koster & Bial” underneath.

So what was The Corner, and who were Koster and Bial? The tenement is all that’s left of a theater and beer garden empire that stretched across Sixth Avenue and offered excess beer, edgy performances, and illicit adventures to libertine New Yorkers.

The story begins in the Gilded Age, when this stretch of Sixth Avenue was part of the Tenderloin—a vice district extending to Ninth Avenue from roughly 23rd Street to 42nd Streets that featured theaters, music halls, saloons, gambling dens, disorderly houses, and every other type of lowdown entertainment worthy of a world-class late 19th century metropolis with money to burn.

In 1879, German immigrants brewers John Koster and Albert Bial opened a concert hall at Sixth Avenue and 23rd Street. Their holdings up until then included three restaurants near City Hall, plus another in the New York Tribune building on Park Row that became a hangout for “politicians, clubmen, brokers, lawyers, and prominent men about town,” wrote the New York Times.

But operating a theater was a different game, especially when bringing musical acts to New Yorkers was second to Koster and Bial’s main goal of distributing and selling beer.

To make it all work, they tried a new type of entertainment. After taking over another existing theater at 115-117 West 23rd Street, they created a 1200-seat venue that’s credited with being the first to introduce vaudeville to New York City—importing talent from Europe to titillate Gilded Age audiences.

In 1886, The Corner was born. Koster and Bial used the red brick tenement as a beer garden annex for their popular theater. “Music programs were presented in the German style of a beer garden with food and drink part of the offerings,” noted 14to42.net. Inside was a handsome bar, as seen below.

The theater/concert hall (below) and The Corner were bookends for a raucous, rollicking scene—with the kind of suggestive performers Gotham soon couldn’t get enough of. Needless to say, this wasn’t Mrs. Astor’s kind of theater, nor Mrs. Vanderbilt’s.

“Business boomed with the likes of Mademoiselle Armen d’Ary from the Follies Bergere, and Maudi, the Lightning Calculator, but Koster and Bial’s biggest draw was the Spanish dancer Carmencita, who is immortalized in portraits by John Singer Sargent and William M. Chase (below),” wrote John Tauranac in his book, Manhattan’s Little Secrets.

Conductor Victor Herbert served as musical director for Koster & Bial’s, playing the venue with his 40-piece orchestra.

Considering that the theater-music hall was in the Tenderloin, it’s not surprising that Koster & Bial allowed a little hanky panky to go on. Under the stage was a space known as the cork room, decorated with the corks from champagne bottles: “where the stage-door johnnies could cavort with the hoofers in an atmosphere decorously described as ‘fast,'” wrote Tauranac.

Boxes inside a balcony that ran across the theater “served as the scene of the most private kinds of activities,” stated Neil Gould, author of Victor Herbert: A Theatrical Life.

Koster and Bial’s entertainment offerings didn’t last long on 23rd Street or at The Corner. “In 1896, Koster & Bial did close and entered into a brief partnership with Oscar Hammerstein 2d at his 34th Street Manhattan Opera House (on the present site of Macy’s),” explained the New York Times in 1995. 

The partnership created a new Koster & Bial’s, but the venture proved to be disastrous. By the century’s end, both men had died, and their 34th Street theater and roof garden closed its doors in 1901.

That wasn’t the end of illicit activity in the red brick tenement at Sixth Avenue and 24th Street. Almost a century later in a very different Manhattan, infamous strip club Billy’s Topless moved into the space in the mid-1970s.

More of a local dive bar with a small stage for topless dancers and a buffet warmed by cans of sterno, Billy’s was one of those infamous New York establishments that in the 1980s and 1990s was tolerated—if not celebrated—as an anachronistic landmark of a grittier city.

Then the late 1990s arrived, and with it Guiliani-era reforms—specifically a new zoning law that barred sex-related businesses from operating within 500 feet of a residence, school, or house of worship. Now, Billy’s existence was threatened.

In the spirit of Koster and Bial, Billy’s held on. As the law took effect, the dancers began wearing bikini tops, and Billy’s Topless became Billy Stopless, as a 2007 post from Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York recalls.

Ultimately Billy’s closed up shop in 2001, ending the tenement’s century-plus run as a site of illicit activity. But the building is for sale; perhaps another vice or sin business will keep the tradition going.

[Third, fourth, and fifth images: NYPL; sixth image: William Merritt Chase/Metmuseum.org; seventh image: Jeremiah’s Vanishing New York]

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