#3: 388-390 West Street (14 Weehawken Street) was built as a one-story commercial corner building for Benjamin Gottfried in 1937 it became West Beach Bar & Grill (c. Remodeled as the Bailey-Holt House of supportive housing by New York City’s HIV/AIDS Service Administration (HASA) in 1986, it was the nation’s first residence for people living with HIV/AIDS. #2: 180 Christopher Street (387 West Street) was built as the Hotel Christopher prior to 1920. Owned by the estate of William Gottlieb since then, it is finally undergoing complete restoration work for residential mixed use, complete with the iconic “hotel” corner sign. 1956-1998), was reputed to be NY’s oldest gay “leather” bar. Keller Bar, which occupied the West Street storefront (c. From 1911-1929 it was the New Keller Hotel, then it became the Keller Abington from 1929 to 1993, at which time the city transformed the hotel into a Single Room Occupancy (SRO) hotel for the indigent. #1: 150 Barrow Street (384 West Street), built as the 6-story Knickerbocker Hotel in 1897-98 by architect Julius Munckwitz, was landmarked in 2007. NOW: On this recent photograph, looking northeast from West and Barrow Streets to the Weehawken Street Historic District, we highlight the histories that once occupied this waterfront scene at the west end of Christopher Street. Credit: NYPL Digital Collections photo from 1929 by Percy Sperr. The abandoned piers, especially at Christopher Street, became sites for clandestine rendezvous. A 1902 newspaper article referred to the piers between Houston and West 14th Streets as “The Farm,” stating that “for years, especially in fine weather, it has at night been the resort of outcasts, drunkards, dissolute people, and a dangerous class of petty highwaymen.” By the 1920’s, the area was called “a street of hotels.” The area with long-established waterfront taverns, losing the rough seamen and longshoreman patrons by the 1960’s, had become a nucleus for bars catering to a gay clientele (those bars that remain still draw nice crowds). The City of New York reserved the block of West Street between Christopher and West 10th Streets, left-center in the photo, as the site of the Greenwich (Weehawken) Market house after they sold off the Newgate State Prison grounds in 1829. The tallest buildings were the Keller and Bell Labs (now Westbeth) in the misty far-left background. On the far right in this 1929 photo, at the corner of Christopher Street, is the Keller Abington Hotel, with the Christopher Hotel to its left.
The architecture illustrates the area’s long history as a place of dwelling, industry, and commerce, much of it maritime-related, and is a rare surviving example of this once typical development pattern on Manhattan’s west side waterfront. THEN: This stretch of West Street, looking northeast from its Barrow Street intersection, represents several phases of construction spanning a century of development (from 1830 to 1938) along Greenwich Village’s Hudson River waterfront.
Today, almost all of the attention to the historic gay scene is focused on the east end of Christopher Street, but there is another important area of Christopher Street that deserves attention: the west end. The June 1969 rebellion against police harassment by the patrons of the Stonewall Inn, at the eastern end of Christopher Street, helped to launch a national gay rights movement and make Christopher Street the social and cultural center of New York’s lesbian and gay community.