An elegy for a surreal East Village dive bar that welcomed those in the shadows

There’s something about legendary East Village bars that leave New Yorkers mourning them even decades after they close their doors.

The tenth anniversary of the shuttering of Mars Bar in 2011, the gritty dive on Second Avenue and East First Street, merited tribute posts recalling its eclectic mix of regulars. Brownie’s, on Avenue A, pulled the plug in 2002, but Gen X fans are still reminiscing about the bands they saw there.

So it seems unusual that one old-school East Village haunt has no Facebook fan group posting photos and videos, no articles bemoaning the reasons behind its closure.

That haunt would be Eileen’s Reno Bar, a hole in the wall at 175 Second Avenue between 11th and 12th Streets. Aside from the circa-1989 photo above, posted in 2015 by Tumblr account noirbynight, and the 1973 photo by Eugene Gordon below with the bar’s neon sign in the background, very little about Eileen’s remains.

The lack of tributes is unusual for a place described by one East Villager who visited in the late 1980s as “a dimly lit, unintentionally surreal bar on the edge of oblivion.” The vibe was “subtle debauchery, in the twilight between the waking life and dreams.”

In other words, Eileen’s was no Irish tavern, or college-crowd sports bar, or glittery nightspot luring stylish young people.

“When you walked in, the first thing you noticed was the leopard skin wallpaper,” said the visitor, who recalls a traditional long bar. Above it, plastic plants hung from the ceiling. “It felt more like a relic of a 1950s lounge, populated by people we think of as living in the shadows in society.”

Writer Gary Indiana included a description of Eileen’s in his 2004 New York article, “One Brief, Scuzzy Moment.” The article focused on the East Village art scene in the mid-1980s, of which Eileen’s played a part.

“A narrow pocket of surrealism on Second Avenue between 11th and 12th, its ceiling surfaced in plastic jade plant—brown plastic jade plant—Eileen’s had its flaccid nights of dead-room tone,” wrote Indiana.

He added that most nights brought in “a steady influx of pre-op transsexuals, clueless walk-ins, bisexual drug dealers, garrulous drunks with a schizophrenic flair . . . and a few black-humored fags like myself, who much preferred the Reno Bar’s nightly Halloween party to clocking the aging process in some drippy gay bar.”

In the article, Indiana recalled one regular, a “laconic and melancholy” man named Joel who drank gin and drove a pickup truck. Later, Indiana learned that Joel was Joel Rifkin—the serial killer from Long Island who preyed on New York City prostitutes.

Who was Eileen? More about her identity isn’t known. Exactly when her Reno Bar opened and closed is also a mystery: I haven’t found a newspaper or website that chronicled its debut or shuttering. (Above photo, about 1940; the space that housed Eileen’s would be the second storefront to the left of the theater, and it doesn’t look like a bar exists there yet.)

In our current era where everything is chronicled via post or image, it’s hard to remember that in the pre-social media world, the closing of a dive bar wouldn’t make the news.

These days, 175 Second Avenue is home to Bar Veloce, a wine bar established in 1999 with several other locations around New York. It fits in to a much different East Village than the one where Eileen’s Reno Bar found its home.

[Top photo: noirbynight; second photo: Eugene Gordon/New-York Historical Society; fouth photo: NYC Department of Records & Information Services]

A pioneering photographer’s snowy street scenes soften the unruly 1890s city

Alfred Stieglitz has racked up an impressive roster of achievements as an artist-photographer.

[“Winter, Fifth Avenue,” 1893]

At the turn of the 20th century, Stieglitz helped make photography a respected art form, staging a successful show at Gramercy Park’s National Arts Club in 1902. He experimented with different photo technology and processes, and he furthered the careers of early photographers like Edward Steichen.

Steichen, along with Stieglitz, was a founding member of the Photo-Secession movement, which took a “’painterly’ approach to photographic image-making,” according to Artspace.

[“The Terminal,” 1893]

But the achievement I’m most impressed with is as an early Gotham street photographer.

Born in Hoboken in 1864 to German Jewish immigrant parents, he found his way to New York City in 1890 after studying the new medium of photography in 1880s Germany. During the next decade, Stieglitz “made New York City his central subject,” per the National Gallery of Art (NGA).

“He walked the streets with a handheld camera, which allowed for more spontaneity than a large camera mounted on a tripod. He concentrated, as he had in Europe, mainly on working-class scenes of daily life, albeit now conveyed with a greater immediacy,” continued the NGA. 

[“The Flatiron,” 1903]

To achieve the pictorial quality he strived for, he made a point of photographing city scenes in snow and rain—which lent an Impressionist effect to his images and bathed gritty streets in a glowy or misty softness, explains the Art Institute of Chicago.

“Stieglitz soon realized that technical challenges other photographers largely shied away from, such as rain, snow, and low light, could be a boon to his picture-making,” states the NGA. “Although such conditions were difficult to work in, they helped unify compositions, softened the unruly city, and tied it to nature.”

[“Winter, New York,” 1898]

But harsh weather conditions didn’t obscure the austerity of New York’s streets. Viewing “Winter, Fifth Avenue” showcases the raw, difficult conditions the carriage driver is facing as he struggles his way up the avenue.

Conditions were raw for Stieglitz as well, who wrote in 1897 that capturing this image of the carriage driver required that he stand for three hours with his “hand camera” awaiting “the proper moment” to shoot.

“An Icy Night in New York,” from 1898 (below), appears to be a benign nocturnal park scene. But the trees flanking the sidewalk can be interpreted as symbols of a menacing and mysterious city.

Throughout his life, Stieglitz continued to photograph New York City, with an increasing focus on the older New York of his young adult years subsumed into the modern skyscraper city.

He captured the Flatiron building, ringed by snow-topped trees, in 1903. Like most New Yorkers, the completion of this 20-plus story structure on 23rd Street made a big impression on him.

“I suddenly saw the Flat-Iron Building as I had never seen it before,” he said, per the Art Institute of Chicago. “It looked, from where I stood, as if it were moving toward me like the bow of a monster ocean steamer, a picture of the new America which was in the making.”

[Self-portrait, 1886]

The city was changing, and Stieglitz was determined to capture the shift.

“My New York is the New York of transition—The Old gradually passing into the New. . . . The Spirit of that something that endears New York to one who really loves it—not for its outer attractions—but for its deepest worth—& significance. —The universal thing in it,” he wrote in 1920, via the Art Institute of Chicago.

By this time, Stieglitz had earned a name for himself as one of the most accomplished photographers of the impending Modernist age.

[“From ‘Room 3003’ – The Shelton, New York, Looking Northeast, 1927]

As Modernism dawned in the early 1900s, Stieglitz would switch his style to “a more straightforward depiction of quotidian life,” states the Metropolitan Museum of Art, illustrated by this East Side snow-topped tenement panorama above.

[Top image: National Gallery of Art; second image: Victoria & Albert Museum; third image: Art Institute of Chicago; fourth image: Victoria & Albert Museum; fifth image: Art Institute of Chicago; sixth image: Wikipedia; seventh image: Art Institute of Chicago]

The story of a reclusive heiress—and what she saw outside her Fifth Avenue window

New York City has always had its share of recluses. Many remain anonymous after years of seclusion behind apartment walls, others become infamous later in life or after death.

Huguette Clark (above photo) falls into the latter category. More than a decade ago, headlines appeared revealing that this forgotten heiress—born in 1906 to rakish copper magnate and Montana senator William A. Clark (below) and his much younger second wife—had been living out the past 20 years in a Manhattan hospital suite, tended to by private nurses.

Following Huguette’s death at Beth Israel Medical Center in 2011, a few weeks shy of her 105th birthday (and with a $300 million fortune to be divvied up), more details of her unusual life came to light.

As a girl (above right), the “Baby Copper Queen” took the path of other rich Gilded Age daughters. She traveled abroad with her parents, studied the violin, graduated from Miss Spence’s School (now Spence), made her debut in society, and married a Princeton graduate described as a “promising young bond salesman” in 1927.

After a divorce in 1930 (Huguette claimed abandonment, her former husband said the marriage had been unconsummated, according to her New York Times obituary), she returned to the palatial twelfth-floor apartment at 907 Fifth Avenue (below) where she had been living with her mother, Anna, since her father’s passing in 1925 at age 86.

Previously, the family resided in a 121-room mansion fronting Fifth Avenue at 77th Street dubbed “Clark’s Folly” because it was so insanely ornate.

Her retreat over the next decades from society events and social outings went unnoticed by the press. Apparently she was content to lead a small life, collecting dolls, visiting the family’s Santa Barbara estate, and staying out of the public eye—a lifestyle her mother seemed to pursue.

“Mrs. Clark did not care for social distinction, nor the obligations that would entail upon my public life,” William Clark once wrote of his wife, according to Bill Dedman’s 2010 NBC News article and photo gallery exploring the family backstory and re-introducing Huguette to contemporary viewers.

When her mother passed away in 1963, Huguette isolated herself even more. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that a frail Huguette arrived at Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side for treatment for skin cancer lesions that disfigured her face. Doctors removed them, but she opted to stay in the hospital.

She transferred to Beth Israel when it merged with Doctors Hospital…and never left.

Huguette’s reasons for leading much of her life in seclusion from the outside world remain a mystery. She left no diary or trail of clues. Maybe she was simply an introvert, or very much her publicity-shy mother’s daughter. Perhaps her reclusiveness was driven by grief after losing her mother, her father, and in 1919, her sister Andree (second photo on the left), who died at age 16 of meningitis.

What she did leave behind are her paintings. While her father was an avid art collector whose collection of 800 or so paintings, sculptures, and antiquities are now housed at the Corcoran Gallery, Huguette herself was an artist with a focus on portraits, landscapes, and still lifes.

The image above is a self-portrait of the heiress as a young woman. Holding her palette and standing before a canvas, she seems to see herself a serious artist. There’s a softness to her face and form that reveals a comfort in this space, most likely a studio in her Fifth Avenue apartment.

The second and third photos have self-evident titles. The first is “Scene From My Window, Night,” (above) which overlooks Fifth Avenue traffic, illumination from headlights and street lamps, and the modern skyscraper cityscape including the Empire State Building in the background.

“Scene From My Window—After the Snowstorm” (below) is a similar nocturne featuring soft lights, a snowy Central Park, and prewar apartment buildings like her own in the distance.

When she painted these and others isn’t known. Huguette did exhibit some of her work at the Corcoran Gallery in 1929, and I imagine these date to about that time. If she exhibited elsewhere, I couldn’t find any reference.

The last two paintings intrigue me. On one hand, they’re lovely landscapes showing what makes New York so enchanting: the lights, the snow, the skyline. They seem to have been painted by someone who took pleasure in this side of Manhattan and wanted to recreate it.

On the other hand, the window panes mimic jail bars. Was Huguette’s Fifth Avenue apartment a kind of prison for her? It’s impossible to know, but I prefer to think that this heiress, one of the last human links to the Gilded Age, put herself there by choice—and created a life behind these masonry and glass walls that gave her fulfillment.

[Top image: NBC News; second image: Wikipedia; fourth image: Indianapolis Star; fourth, fifth, and sixth images: Artnet.com]

What it was like walking under the Ninth Avenue El

Not many New Yorkers today have memories of the city’s elevated trains, which shook tenement windows and roared above the streetscape from the 1860s to the 1950s—when the final line, the Third Avenue El, was dismantled.

Let Bernard Gussow, a Russia-born artist who studied, taught, painted, and created lithographs in New York City in the first half of the 20th century, give you a glimpse of New Yorkers walking under the Ninth Avenue El. This line was the first to open in 1868, and most of the tracks met their demise in 1940.

“Late Afternoon, Columbus Avenue, New York,” was completed in the 1920s or 1930s; the date is unclear. In this view, an unnamed Upper West Side side street, with charming brownstone steps and little traffic, is framed by rusted steel tracks and support beams. Faceless men and women go about their day.

Gussow certainly isn’t the first artist to paint New York’s networks of elevated tracks. But he seemed to have an interest in depicting humanity amid the machinery of urban transit. These midcentury paintings capture the anonymity and intimacy of riding the New York City subway.

[Image: 1stdibs.com]

The “footsore and hungry” men waiting on the coffee line at Madison Square

There’s a civility among the men waiting in line for a free cup of coffee on a snow-covered night in Madison Square Park.

Shrouded in wintertime darkness, the long mass of men portrayed in John Sloan’s “The Coffee Line” stand with a sense of order. It’s not a horde jostling and grabbing; the men seem to form a single file queued up at the back of the coffee wagon, waiting for a cup.

Sloan, a Philadelphia transplant living on West 23rd Street at the time, apparently came upon this scene one night in 1905. He described it some years later:

“Winter night, Fifth Avenue at Madison Square, and a long line of cold and hungry men waiting their turn for a cup of coffee. This gratuity was a kindly gesture on the part of one of the newspapers,” quoted Michael Lobel in his book John Sloan: Drawing on Illustration.

The coffee wagons were part of a charity effort from William Randolph Hearst: wagons filled with coffee and rolls would stop in city parks at night to distribute their wares to “the footsore and hungry who have tramped the streets all day in the biting wind in search of work or food,” per a New York newspaper in 1906.

(Hearst was also running for mayor in 1905, so perhaps the charity coffee wagon was an attempt to refine his image.)

In 1905, Sloan (above, in an 1890 self-portrait) wasn’t the renowned Ashcan artist of tragic and comic moments in urban life; recognition by the art world came a few years later. When it did, “The Coffee Line” served as an example of Sloan’s ”relentless truthfulness,” as one California newspaper put it in 1909.

The darkness in “The Coffee Line” makes it hard to see the men; they’re the faceless and unseen New Yorkers lined up inside a park few New Yorkers would visit at this hour. Sloan makes us work to see them, squinting and staring until a figure or two appears—with help from the weak glow of streetlights reflected off the snow.

[“The Coffee Line”: Carnegie Museum of Art; self-portrait: Wikipedia]

A revealing wintertime photo of lower Fifth Avenue taken before the Civil War

Is this one of the oldest cityscape photo of New York City? Dating to 1855, according to the New-York Historical Society, it’s definitely in the running. (These photos seem to predate it by a decade or so.)

The photo is a copy of an original photo shot by an unknown photographer looking north from 21st Street and 22nd Street. We’re in antebellum Manhattan, when the avenue is still residential, even country-like. Madison Square had become a city park about a decade earlier; see the bare wintertime trees poking out beyond the high-stooped brownstones.

The church steeple probably belongs to Marble Collegiate Church, opened in 1854 at 29th Street. (The church erected an iron fence to keep livestock off their grounds!) The Fifth Avenue Hotel—mocked for being so far from the rest of the city—is four years away from opening in 1859.

As a child in the 1860s, Edith Wharton lived on 23rd Street just off Fifth Avenue. Her memories of the avenue at that time—which she calls a “placid and uneventful thoroughfare”—offer an idea of what it was like several years earlier:

“The little girl and her father walked up Fifth Avenue; the old Fifth Avenue with its double line of low brown-stone houses, of a desperate uniformity of style, broken only—and surprisingly—by two equally unexpected features: the fenced-in plot of ground where the old Miss Kennedys’ cows were pastured, and the truncated Egyptian pyramid which so strangely served as a reservoir for New York’s water supply,” Wharton wrote in 1934’s A Backward Glance.

What a rare glimpse at pre-Gilded Age New York—before an explosion in population and wealth brought enormous mansions, then a rollicking theater district and shopping emporiums, to this serene section of the city’s most central thoroughfare.

[Photo: New-York Historical Society]

The despondent artist who painted a dark and distorted 1920s New York City

His name doesn’t seem to generate much enthusiasm today. But Arthur Clifton Goodwin, born in 1864 in New Hampshire, earned praise and space in exhibitions as a painter of city streets, landscapes, and waterways in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Self-taught and based mostly in Boston during his lifetime, he belonged to no school or movement, per the John Raimondi Gallery.

Swan boats at the Public Garden, Boylston Street in the evening light, snow-covered Beacon Hill—many of his Boston cityscapes were infused with warmth and light in an Impressionist style, which was popular among American artists of the time.

But the painting above, likely completed between 1920 and 1927 when he lived in New York, has a darker feel. “Fifth Avenue, New York, Near St. Patrick’s” used gritty brushstrokes to create sooty skies, rain-soaked streets, and a dark and distorted Fifth Avenue.

“Times Square, New York,” also dating to the 1920s, is equally rough and murky. In this entertainment mecca of electric theater lights and illuminated billboards, Goodwin depicted a distant patch of blue sky amid shades of gray, black, and white—along with humans navigating slushy sidewalks and overshadowed by the brick and mortar canyon.

It’s too simplistic to read into an artist’s backstory and come up with a clear reason for a change in tone or style. But without much to go on concerning Goodwin’s backstory, a possible explanation for his dark turn could be found in the biographical writeup on the Raimondi Gallery website: heartbreak.

“In 1920, Goodwin painted Washington Square from his studio there. After his marriage failed, the despondent artist returned to Boston and Goodwin led the life of a Bohemian and drank excessively,” the writeup states.

Goodwin’s despondency apparently led to his death at age 65 in 1929.

“Although Goodwin never studied in Paris, he vowed one day he would go to see the Impressionists work firsthand. Tragically, after an excessive drinking binge, Goodwin was found dead in his Boston studio with tickets to Paris in his pocket.”

[Top painting: Grogan & Company; second painting: Wikipedia]

A New York City painter captures the light and magic of Christmas morning

Born in Prussia in 1841, Henry Mosler spent his early years in New York City as part of a Jewish family that escaped revolution and war in their homeland.

His humble beginnings forced him to sell newspapers at City Hall as a child; he also worked for a time stripping tobacco, per his 1920 obituary. Only after his family relocated to Cincinnati and established a business manufacturing safes did Mosler launch his long career as a painter.

He covered the Western theater of the Civil War as a correspondent for Harper’s Monthly, then spent decades living in France, winning salon prizes and notoriety for his portraits of life in Brittany.

In 1894 he decided to return to New York City. Mosler set up a studio in Carnegie Hall and focused on historical genre paintings—pictorial representations of events in American history.

Why Mosler (above in 1860), of Jewish heritage, decided to paint this Christmas scene in 1916 is a bit of a mystery. In it he depicts two children peering out the cracked door of their shadowy bedroom and into the glow of the family Christmas tree laden with presents.

It’s an enchanting scene of light and dark, of discovery and surprise. We can’t see the children’s expressions, but no matter—the painting perfectly captures the magic of a child’s Christmas morning.

[Second image: Wikipedia]

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]

A painter captures the rich street life of a busy day in Lower Manhattan in 1951

On a busy day in 1951, a hot dog vendor found himself captive to a hawker of cheap jewelry who set up shop across from his rickety food cart decorated with American flags.

Horses still worked the side streets of the city. Stray dogs waited for food scraps to fall to the pavement. TV antennas sprout from tenements; litter collects in the gutter. Corner stores exhibit life and activity.

And a New York artist named Philip Reisman was there, apparently, to capture these and other rich snippets of visual poetry in a painting he titled simply “Busy Day,” painted in 1951.

Born in Poland in 1904, Reisman and his family fled pograms for the safety (and poverty) of New York City. His father discouraged him from studying art, but he took classes at the Arts Student League and found critical recognition and success through the 20th century for his paintings and etchings.

“His early paintings were candid, crowded scenes of the life he saw around him on the Lower East Side of New York: butchers, carters, peddlers, and homeless men in the Bowery,” states the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

What I wish I knew is the street the painting captures. The slight bend in the sidewalk makes me think of Doyers Street in Chinatown, or another cowpath-turned-road somewhere in Lower Manhattan.