Hell Frozen Over

It had been snowing relentlessly for days and the cars parked along the streets of Hell’s Kitchen were buried up to their side mirrors. Coming down the brownstone stoops, owners gripped their shovels with gloved hands and growled at the work that lie ahead. Scarfed and hatted pedestrians kept their heads low against the wind and tried to circumnavigate the pools of slush which formed at every intersection without getting a bootful of chilled water. Newscasters on the radio were having fun coming up with names for the storm that referenced the end of the world, then chuckling at their own wit.

Two children, exiled from a shuttered schoolhouse, busied themselves by building the snowfort to end all snowforts. It had taken them the better half of the day to burrow in from the bottom using an old coffee can, and out the top, forming a combination turret and observation post. Their little blue knit caps peeked conspicuously out from the mounds of white as they prepared to do battle with an invisible adversary. Their armory of snowballs was well-stocked. An ambitious photography student slipped on a patch of ice and broke her camera. She sat with her legs splayed, gazing mournfully at the wreckage.

As the clouded sun quietly toddled off to bed, the blankets of snow took up the task of reflecting the city lights with enough intensity that the sun was hardly missed. The evening sidewalks were lit by a moonglow, as though they had somehow become gently radioactive. A stooped woman in a green parka took her dachshund for a walk. The dachshund sniffed the frozen ground at the base of a tree, uncertain. It lifted a hindleg without much enthusiasm, but conditions didn’t seem right. The dog abandoned this attempt and continued along in hopes of finding a more suitable spot to conduct its business farther ahead. The stooped woman just wanted to get it over with so she could go inside and bathe her feet in scalding water.

An Irish youth came bursting out the entrance of the corner pub. Without hesitation he bounded across the icy sidewalk and dove headfirst into the snowbank with a muffled crunch. His short legs flailed in the air, like a vaudeville clown wedged in a barrel. His companions who followed him out of the pub doubled with laughter at his sudden lunacy. He pulled himself out, shook the snow from his wet hair and grinned.

“What if there’d been a hydrant there?” a laughing girl exclaimed.

He shrugged. “There wasn’t.”

Swing Street

Strolling down 52nd Street between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, one notices the plate glass windows and steel frames of banks and hotels, the numerous revolving doors and loading docks. Though the signpost on the corner designates this as “Swing Street,” even the casual observer must note that there is nothing remotely swinging about this particular stretch of concrete and steel. Aside from the banks there are a few clothing shops, a FedEx store, a Sheraton Executive Conference Center, The Paley Center for Media, and a certain well-known coffeeshop whose origin can be traced to the northwest coast. The only thing within sight that seems even mildly historic is the 21 Club, a former speakeasy, with its balcony of cast iron lawn jockeys.

From the nineteen thirties to the fifties it was a different story. The streets were lined with Victorian brownstones ablaze with ghostly neon, thriving nightclubs with names like The Onyx, The Three Deuces, The Famous Door, the Downbeat, the Yacht Club, Jimmy Ryan’s, and, later, Birdland. On any given night one could drift from venue to venue, falling under the spell of such jazz legends as Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Sidney Bechet, Lennie Tristano, Art Tatum, Thelonious Monk, Coleman Hawkins, and Lester Young, a pantheon of the greats. Bird’s tortured flights of freedom. Monk staggering over broken keys. Tristano’s tempered trapezoids. Dizzy’s musical puns. Every night up and down the block it all came pouring from the entrances.

As bebop gradually infiltrated mass consciousness, 52nd Street was its headquarters. This was serious music to be listened to, to be studied and understood. Never mind that corny dance jive of yesterday, the syncopated high hat seemed to proclaim, the real questions were being asked right here. Glenn Miller had been lost during the war and this was his replacement. And it spoke in a language better equipped to deal with postwar existential terror, a jagged dialogue of flatted fifths, not known for nothing as the Devil’s Interval. Blackclad femmes with cocaine eyes watching from the front tables. An audience of hornrims and goatees, nodding in rhythmic conspiracy. A few undercover narcotics agents towards the back attempting a low profile. Where there’s smoke there’s fire, and the room is smouldering. A tousle-haired trumpet player comes tottering off the bandstand in a heroin haze, beats a fast exit up the fire escape as a cigarette girl creates a diversion. But everyone listens.

By the mid-fifties the street was in decline. Many of the clubs had adapted into strip joints where the music decidedly took a backseat to the action. Rock ‘n’ roll was the new kid in town. Jazz was doomed to be usurped by rock, as youth discovered it didn’t want to analyze from its chair, it wanted to shake, rattle, and if possible, roll. And youth has in its possession the disposable income, so naturally it will be targeted by those whose business it is to dispose of it. Ma and pa still remember the Depression. They’re going to be much harder to separate from their savings. But their affluent offspring are ripe for the taking. So if it’s a simple beat and a curled lip the kids want, a simple beat and a curled lip is what they’ll get.

In 1959, Miles Davis made headlines after getting roughed up by a cop in front of Birdland for refusing to be pushed around. Miles’ name happened to be on the marquee but the cop was more concerned with the white woman at Miles’ side. A photo circulated showing the musician bleeding from a head wound as the police took him into custody. A decade later he was to corner rock music on his own turf and have his way with it on the infamous Bitches Brew album.

But by then the last jazz club had boarded its doors and the whole place sentenced to the bulldozer. Swing Street in any recognizable form disappeared without a trace. Its heyday can only be glimpsed in surviving photographs of the period, and as a fondly recreated set in Clint Eastwood’s tribute to Charlie Parker, Bird. Some shots of a washed-up Swing Street can be spotted in the film Sweet Smell of Success, as Lancaster and Curtis are leaving the 21 Club. The western end of the row is now affectionately known as “W.C. Handy’s Place,” though who in midtown today even remembers who W.C. Handy was?

Maestro of the Maelstrom

He makes his entrance. Sxip Shirey, the mad impresario in the pinstriped suit. The great maestro of the maelstrom. An unholy alliance between Dr Caligari and Archimedes, between Svengali and Gyro Gearloose. Equal parts lion tamer, carnival barker, vaudeville buffoon, gypsy fortuneteller, madcap inventor, and serious composer. A table at his side contains a hodgepodge of junkyard toys transformed into musical instruments through some devious form of alchemy. Mutant harmonicas, dented music boxes, marbles spun in a bowl, dinner bells, bicycle chimes, a megaphone, pennywhistles duct-taped together. When piped through his assortment of pitchshifters and echo units the most docile of flutes becomes a catastrophic pipe organ, bellowing straight from the bowels of a demon.

Sxip Shirey has been a fixture on the New York avant-garde music scene since the glory days of Coney Island, where he entertained the rubes at Steeplechase Park. As a dashing young snake oil peddler, Sxip offered the gathering crowds a mysterious elixir which for mere pennies would cure both halitosis and impotence. He befriended the local fire eaters and stiltwalkers, and palled around with Gummo and Chico Marx before they struck it big. Some claim to have been present at afterhours jam sessions featuring Chico on piano and Sxip on a secondhand accordion. Some have even suggested Sxip had a hand in originating Chico’s signature shoot-the-keys trick. He performed for such luminaries as Roosevelt and Freud while sultry gangster’s molls watched from the wings. At night he slept behind the carousel and dreamt of bigger things.

Sxip firmly aligned himself with Nikola Tesla during the great debate between alternating and direct current. On catching wind of Edison’s infernal plot to electrocute an elephant and therefore demonstrate the alleged danger of Tesla’s alternating current, Sxip rushed down to the boardwalk just in time to witness the poor creature collapse in a sizzling heap. He had been too late to stop it. Glowering, he cursed Edison soundly and ever since has harbored a disdain for the electric lightbulb. To this day he prefers candlelight.

During the twenties Sxip visited Berlin to absorb the thriving cabaret scene. He stayed in the same hotel as Christopher Isherwood and in fact makes a small appearance in the novel Goodbye to Berlin. He once notably performed a birthday toast to Marlene Dietrich at the Wintergarten. In return she gave him his first ocarina, which he still cherishes. Although Sxip felt at home in the decadent Weimar Republic among the flappers, transvestites, and dope fiends, he was convinced by an apprehensive Fritz Lang that the political situation was getting out of hand. He soon returned by steamship to America.

Sxip settled in Hollywood in the early fifties to compose soundtracks to various science fiction films. Some of his scores include instrumentation commonly assumed to be the theremin (predating Bernard Herrmann’s landmark use of one in The Day the Earth Stood Still), but which are actually conventional horns recorded with varispeed techniques. Though proud of his work in film, Sxip left Hollywood embittered by the assembly line mentality of the studio system which he felt devalued the artist. Nor did he like what the California sun did to his complexion. However, his lengthy correspondence with electronic pioneer Raymond Scott dating to this period is due to be published next year by Oscillator Books.

Surprisingly, Sxip mostly sat out the sixties. One would assume his often eccentric and irreverent stylings would fit in seamlessly with the psychedelic aesthetics of the time period. But Sxip took that decade to lay down his tools and do some serious soul searching. He traveled extensively in Eastern Europe and became fascinated with the Balkan and klezmer cultures he encountered there. On returning to New York he drew on these influences to form the Luminescent Orchestrii, a popular attraction on the Lower East Side with their unique brand of Romanian gypsy punk.

Which brings us back to today, with Sxip in the role of master of ceremonies for the strange and wonderful Evelyn Evelyn sisters at the Lucille Lortel Theater deep in the groin of the Village. He entertains the crowd with tales of sharing a toilet seat with Bertolt Brecht and displays his talents at silhouette puppetry. Then he lifts an instrument from his wunderkammer and erupts into another tune. He is an urban witchdoctor, dancing on footpedals and conjuring locomotives out of the stage and jet engines out of the baffles. Images of whirling carousels and gold teeth fill the theater, of bellydancers and swordswallowers, of vapor trails and teakettles and lids of steamer trunks slamming. And with his blessing he sends us back out into the streets of New York, a little better prepared for what we will find there.

A Wandering Space Mutant

The great electric worm burrows beneath the East River in the direction of the city. Morning commuters try their damndest to avoid eye contact with each other, hiding behind newspapers, novels, makeup kits, and eyelids. An ageless woman wrapped in a blanket tosses pistachio shells on the floor underneath her seat. Three separate people are wearing eyepatches, unrelated. A mustachioed businessman stands with his crotch as conspicuously close as possible to the face of a seated girl who closes her eyes and wishes herself elsewhere.

The door at the far end of the subway car slides open and the roar of the tunnel comes whooshing in. A character has arrived. He wears a shimmering spacesuit with antennae on his head and carries a gleaming saxophone made from an unearthly metal. The genetic result of George Clinton of Parliament-Funkadelic mating with a Teletubby. He pushes back his cape and speaks.

“People of Earth, I have come bearing a message and the message is this.”

Then he presses the instrument to his lips and unleashes a cascade of cacophony. It sounds like a madman driving a jeep through a cheese grater. Those unprotected by earbuds or headphones hastily cover their ears. Those with some kind of prop quickly bury themselves deeper in it. At the other end of the car, two resourceful young commuters escape through the emergency door into the successive car. After nearly a minute of this, the unendurable squawking mercifully lets up and the interloper announces, “Now, if all of you will contribute some money I will promise to stop playing.”

Hands dart into change purses and wallets, prayers there is enough change to send this wandering space mutant back to the planet from which he came.

The Disorderly House

The Bridge Cafe gets its name from being located in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. In one form or another the wood-frame building has been serving drinks since 1794. First as a grocery, then as a “disorderly house,” which was a polite way of referring to a brothel, then as a series of taverns and watering holes. The interior still retains a twenties’ speakeasy atmosphere. It is one of several bars in Manhattan that lays claim to the title of “New York’s Oldest Drinking Establishment.” And it is reportedly haunted by the ghost of Gallus Mag, the notorious bouncer who kept a jar of severed ears she’d bitten off some of the more unruly patrons.

An old man hunches over a corner table beside a family of tourists, chatting at them over his steak dinner with a little too much aggression than the setting calls for. The young daughter performs ballet pirouettes for her own amusement, often using the far wall to brake her momentum. Sepia photos of old New York threaten to drop from their mountings. The old coot watches the girl with a little too much interest. Police have been summoned for less instigation than the glint in his eye. The mother looks concerned. The father hastily signals for the check. The daughter is lost in her twirls. They escape to the safety of South Seaport and the salty old lech returns his attention to his steak, stabbing it with glee. Somehow he suits the cafe’s decor perfectly. He may well have occupied that table since the days of bootleggers and bathtub gin, a river pirate with gold teeth and a knife tucked in his boot.

Outside the cobblestone streets are slick with rain. They seemingly haven’t changed much since the days when Herman Melville strode them in search of a ship leaving port. Nearby is the location of the mansion George Washington lived in while he was President and New York the temporary Capitol. The mansion no longer stands, as it was stepped on by one of the Brooklyn Bridge pilings. As I understand it, there is a plaque commemorating the site, though it is blocked off by a construction fence and no longer accessible to the public. Some wish to have the plaque moved to a more visible location, but so far their request has been ignored on grounds that the plaque should mark the exact spot regardless of whether anyone can see it or not. Until that situation gets sorted, those longing for a whiff of Washington’s spectral presence will have to make due with the Fraunces Tavern, where the former general did much of his presidential carousing.

[Oil painting by Janet Ternoff]

The Abandoned City Hall Station

“This is the last stop,” calls out the train operator in a tone not to be trifled with. But myself and a light sprinkling of curiosity seekers remain seated. We know better and will not be daunted. She calls out again but we sit firmly in silent protest. An amiable college student approaches her to ask if he might be allowed to remain aboard as the train loops back to make its return trip uptown. But she’s not having it. He can very well take his puppy eyes and pleading tone and get the hell off her train. And that goes for the rest of us too. A standoff. Then an orange-vested worker comes to the rescue. He pokes his head through the doors and urges her to let us ride the loop. The train operator shrugs and steps back into her compartment. A moment later the train jolts to life. The stubborn passengers smile to themselves, a bloodless battle won. Collectively yet independently we keep watch out the right side windows, seized with a giddy anticipation that we are soon to witness something rare.

The subway station located beneath New York’s City Hall first opened in 1904 and was abandoned in 1945. The powers that be determined the station didn’t receive enough traffic to pull its own weight. A pity because its elegance put all other stations to shame. This was the dinstinguished gentleman’s means of travel—brass chandeliers, stained glass skylights, tiled archways, brass fixtures. Everything but a grand piano. A Roman bathhouse of a station, by all accounts.

One intrepid young adventurer has his point-n-click readied. How he intends to get a decent shot of anything but his own reflection in the grimy window is beyond me, but who am I to discourage? The train slows as it heads into a curve and we are rewarded with our first glimpse of the forgotten station. From the perspective on board the train it is impossible to glimpse much of the station’s rumored splendor. The chandeliers and skylights are above the range of sight. The dusty platform itself, illuminated by the murky glow of a series of lightbulbs that look straight from Edison’s workbench, could pass as the lair of some unknown breed of subterranean prowler. A flight of stairs lead up into mystery. There are no visible footprints in the dust.

And then it is over. The train passes through several yards of darkened tunnel then emerges in the brightly-lit Brooklyn Bridge station, poised for its uptown run. We stagger out as though from a sinister carnival ride into the daylight, emotions stirred by what we have seen. Or did we see it? The kid with the camera is fidgeting with the playback mechanism, eager for evidence that it wasn’t some sort of fleeting hallucination. He managed to capture a blurred image of a green tiled sign that can just be discerned to read “City Hall.” It was there after all.

To be honest, the City Hall station is far from forgotten. Photos are in abundance all over the Internet. To the train operators who pass through it everyday as part of their route it is just another tedious part of the workday, much like an elevator or a water cooler or the gated entrance to a parking ramp. If anything, a nuisance to attract goggle-eyed history buffs with their cameras and persistence. To those of us with limited access, though, it remains an urban Atlantis, its existence spoken of in hushed reverence like a closely guarded secret.

[Postcard from Forgotten NY]

McGurk’s Suicide Hall

New York’s Bowery at the end of the nineteenth century was nothing if not a colorful avenue, and one of the more prevalent colors was red. Blood red, to be specific. This was the era of clip joints, blind tigers, and groggeries with names like Tub of Blood, The Morgue, and Hell’s Gate, which were frequented by unsavory characters such as Piker Ryan and his Whyo gang, Monk Eastman, and Owney Geoghegan, a former pugilist turned “brewer, barkeeper and brawler.”

The most notorious dive to be immortalized in urban folklore was owned by an Irish immigrant named John H. McGurk. Born in 1853, McGurk immigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen. Sources are sketchy about his early days in the country. He may have attended school in Providence, Rhode Island in 1880, or worked as a “heater’s helper” in Reading, Pennsylvania. By 1885 he was in New York, where he fell in with the Tammany Hall crowd and opened a succession of clip joints around the Bowery such as The Mug, Sailor’s Snug Harbor, and The Merrimac. All of these suffered frequent police raids under Mayor Hewitt’s administration and each one eventually shut down. There was nothing to indicate his next venture would be any different.

McGurk’s Saloon, as it was originally called, opened in 1895 at 295 Bowery in a brick five-story tenement building that had once been a hotel frequented by union soldiers during the Civil War. Located in the heart of the old Red Light District, the saloon had the distinction of sporting one of the first electric signs in the city. The clientele typically consisted of sailors, pickpockets, panhandlers, waterfront thieves, gang members, morphine addicts, and prostitutes—or as the police reports frequently described them, “women of no occupation.” Entertainment was provided by singing waiters and a small band. Whiskey was the drink of choice, selling for five cents a glass. Liquor was often mixed with water and liquid camphor (also used as moth repellent and embalming fluid) to strengthen the drink—sometimes fatally. Waiters were armed with chloral hydrate (the ever-popular Mickey Finn) for doping unsuspecting guests as preparation for back alley robbery, or worse. Secret passages provided a means for hasty exits in the event of raids. These emptied out behind the saloon into Horseshoe Alley, which was reportedly pitch black even in the daylight.

The saloon was run by a lively staff who more often than not boasted criminal records. The headwaiter was Charles “Short-Change Charley” Steele, once arrested for burglary and attempted murder, but released when none of the witnesses could identify him. A bouncer named John Sullivan, alias Charles Moon, would be charged with illegal voting and sentenced to Sing Sing for two and a half years. The manager, Bart O’Connor, was arrested for illegal registration, having promised men free lodging and all the drinks they wanted if they voted for the Tammany ticket. According to rumors another McGurk employee was Commodore Dutch, a freeloader and con artist later famous for his forty year stint chairing a “society” whose sole purpose was to collect funds for himself. He later became a regular at McSorley’s Old Ale House. Also on the roster was a piano player named Ray Walker who later gained fame as a composer of pre-World War I popular songs such as “Funny Bunny Hug,” “Yiddisha Rag,” “Fido is a Hot Dog Now,” and “How Do You Like Your Oysters?”

And of course on hand as “mayhem specialist” was a pock-marked ex-prizefighter with cauliflower ears known as Thomas “Eat ‘Em Up Jack” McManus who, according to a newspaper account of the time, wore “a flaming cerise tie and a derby at a tilted angle.” His official role was that of “sheriff,” which was essentially an armed bouncer. He was regularly rounded up by police as a suspicious character, and arrested numerous times for assault, but always released when the victims refused to press charges. Once he nearly tore the ear off an opponent whom he accused of squealing to the police.

What distinguished McGurk’s Saloon from the other roughneck dives on skid row was that it soon became the suicide den of choice for Bowery prostitutes down on their luck. Figures are hazy, but there were reportedly from six to a dozen self-administered deaths in the year 1899 alone. Swallowing carbolic acid was the most popular method of offing oneself. Later known as Phenol, carbolic acid was typically used as a disinfectant and was easily available at pharmacies. As it causes severe chemical burns when coming in contact with skin, ingesting carbolic acid is not the most pleasant way to die. Eyewitness accounts of such suicides often include the description “writhing in agony.” Phenol injections would later be used as a mean of extermination by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau, first injected into the veins of the victim, then later, perhaps in a time-saving gesture, injected directly into the heart.

Blonde Madge Davenport and Big Mame were two such prostitutes who chose the carbolic acid route, possibly mixing the acid into their booze to make it more palatable. Blonde Madge died of internal chemical burn. Big Mame was less successful. She spilled most of the acid on her face, disfiguring herself, which got her permanently barred from the saloon. Another casualty named Tina Gordon soon followed and still others may have thrown themselves from a high window. The suicides “got to be quite a fad,” an observer later recounted, and the saloon was quickly rechristened McGurk’s Suicide Hall as a shrewd marketing ploy to attract the morbidly curious. John McGurk even strung together a speech to recite over the bodies: “Most of the women who come to my place have been on the down grade too long to think of reforming. I just want to say that I never pushed a girl downhill any more than I ever refused a helping hand to one who wanted to climb.” The waiters and bouncers got to be fairly astute at spotting the potential suicides ahead of time and developed tactics for ousting them off McGurk property before they could succumb.

The suicides were not just relegated to the saloon and newspapers of the time were chock full of such accounts. A woman was found dead in a hotel room at the Oxford Hotel, just up the street at 303 Bowery. There was a nearly empty bottle of carbolic acid beside her, and her male companion was nowhere to be found. The Oxford Hotel was believed by the police captain to have been owned by McGurk.

With this kind of reputation the police couldn’t be kept away for long. There were countless raids on the saloon, often led by an Inspector Cross. Newspapers gave lurid accounts of sailors and gamblers, women “conducting themselves indecorously” and all manner of “indiscretions” happening in the upstairs rooms. McGurk was frequently charged with “running a disorderly house.”

By 1899 reform was in the air. Governor Theodore Roosevelt and Republican state legislators established a committee headed by Assemblyman Robert Mazet to investigate corruption in Tammany Hall. It wasn’t long before they turned their attentions to dens of ill-repute. The Mazet committee got a lot of mileage out of the testimony of a sixteen-year-old streetwalker named Emma Hartig who had survived a carbolic acid suicide attempt. In 1902 Seth Low was elected as reform mayor and under his administration McGurk’s Suicide Hall shut down for good.

Tom McManus, by now having acquired a second moniker of “The Brute,” opened a music hall of his own called Eat ‘Em Up Jacks. By 1905 he was back to working as a bouncer at a dive appropriately called The Folly. That year he got in a dispute over a woman with a notorious gangster named Chick Tricker who owned a joint of his own called The Fleabag. A pistol duel left Tricker with a bullet in his leg and one of his associates with six knifewounds. The next day, as McManus was leaving The Folly someone crept out of an alley and cracked his skull with an iron bar wrapped in newspaper. His murderer was never arrested, nor his identity satisfactorily revealed. A boxer named Tony “Kid Tuths” Cio was arrested under suspicion and later released, though some accounts say the killer was probably an associate of Tricker’s named Sardinia Frank. The most likely suspect, Chick Tricker, had an airtight alibi—he lay recovering in St. Vincent’s Hospital.

Philip McKenzie, who was McGurk’s nephew and a business partner, understandably had a falling out with McManus after McManus kicked out one of his eyes in a dispute. McKenzie and a bartender were arrested in 1900 after following a man out of the Suicide Hall, after presumably slipping him a mickey, where they proceeded to beat and rob him. He was sentenced to a reformatory and died of heart disease in 1905.

During the Suicide Hall’s heyday a woman known as the “Pride of the Stevedores” and her husband Big Barney were regulars at the saloon. They would waltz down the middle of the saloon as everyone would push their tables against the wall to clear space. Big Barney and the woman later disappeared. She resurfaced many years later with a new husband named Billy the Gink, called so because his right eye had been knocked out. By then the woman was known as Deaf Lilly, and in 1910 Billy the Gink beat her to death in their apartment and fled.

As for John H. McGurk, he made a killing in the real estate racket. Among his property was the Avondale Flats apartment on 77th Street, which suffered $4000 in damage when a fire broke out, and the Raines Law Hotel at 110 Third Avenue, which was described by Magistrate Henry Brann as “a resort for disorderly women and thieves.” In 1902 he absconded to Riverside, California with his wife Louisa, his daughter Martina, and $500,000 in tow, presumably to escape conviction. He forfeited $1000 in bail when he didn’t appear for court after being charged with “keeping a disorderly house.” His counsel explained to the court that McGurk was ill in a sanitarium, though it was common knowledge that he had fled to the west coast. McGurk died in California on January 29, 1913 at the age of 59.

The Suicide Hall was a natural for literary material. Soon after it closed a play appeared by Theodore Kremer called The Bowery After Dark, which was partially set there. The Hall also provides the setting for Mae West’s novel Diamond Lil, in which the second chapter is titled “Suicide Hall.” In 1994 a theatre group called Elevator Repair Service performed a play called McGurk: A Cautionary Tale.

As for the building itself, from World War I until the 1950s it was known as the Liberty Hotel, a Skid Row flophouse with a sign above the door that read “When did you write to mother?” During Prohibition the demise of McGurk’s was exalted as a sign of prohibition’s success. In the mid-60s it was converted into an artist co-op and became a refuge for women artists, such as the feminist writer and sculptor Kate Millett and the photographer and furniture maker Sophie Keir. Millett lived there for thirty-eight years until the tenants were evicted in 1999 by the Cooper Square Urban Renewal Project who wanted to demolish the building and put up a modern residential-business complex.

In the nineties the legend of McGurk’s Suicide Hall was revitalized by its appearance in Luc Sante’s Low Life. Still, the Landmarks Preservation Commission denied landmark status to the building, after deciding that it did not have “sufficient historical, cultural or architectural merit.”

During the building’s final years a wheatpaste poster of a skull talking on a cordless phone hung from the fourth story of the outside wall. It was later joined by a large sign which pleaded “Save 295 Bowery,” as well as laminated articles describing the history of the building, stapled at eye-level.

In 2005, the building which housed McGurk’s Suicide Hall was bulldozed by Avalon Bay Communities to make way for their Avalon Bowery Place apartment complex. Avalon Bay advertised their new development as “one of Manhattan’s finest locations in Soho,” despite the fact that the site lies a block north of Houston. A relocated Millett derided it as “housing for yuppies.” Future residents should not be surprised to discover their crisp new apartments haunted by the ghosts of women of no occupation, rifling through the medicine cabinet in search of an antidote.

“If McGurk’s is turned to dust and supplanted with blank high rise market housing, official power will have buried its past in order to expunge it. Then it will be as if it never happened. No one will ever have to notice these deaths, mysterious folk reason that this building has stubbornly remained notorious for a hundred years, a landmark of gossip and legend repeated in every nook about the city of New York, an eerie and appalling specter never dealt with, formally and publicly never acknowledged.” — Kate Millet, former 295 Bowery resident