travsd

RIP 21 Club

The media is abuzz today with the sad news that the 21 Club is the latest victim of Covid-19. Staff are to be laid off as of March, and there are no plans to reopen for the foreseeable future.

Located at 21 West 52nd Street, just north of Rockefeller Center, the 90 year old bar/restaurant was a fashionable haunt frequented by the likes of Marilyn Monroe, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (he proposed to her there), Orson Welles, Joan Crawford, Veronica Lake, Frank Sinatra and Ava Gardner, JFK and Jackie, Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, and scores of others. Literary types too. Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway. Columnist Dorothy Kilgallen. Ed Sullivan broadcast his radio show from the 21 Club in the 1940s. The prevalence of columnists in the club made it a natural location for the movie classic Sweet Smell of Success (1957). You can also see it in All About Eve (1950), natch, Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), and a zillion other movies.

The joint had originally operated down in the village under a variety of other names, and was a Speakeasy, Prohibition being in full force at the time. On one occasion when columnist Walter Winchell was banned from the club, he retaliated by demanding a police raid in his column — and got one. During those early years, the booze was kept on special retractable shelves that dumped the bottles down a chute when the cops came! At any rate, barring an unexpected rescue, the 21 Club now joins Chumley’s in the ranks of the silenced Speakeasies.

Thanks to Lisa Ferber, a felicitous messenger and latter-day habitue of 21, for relating the news.

Published by travsd

Writer and performer Trav S.D. (www.travsd.com) is best known for his books "No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (2005) and "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" (2013). He has written for the NY Times, the Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out NY, Reason, the Villager and numerous other publications. Trav has been in the vanguard of New York’s vaudeville and burlesque scenes since 1995 when he launched his company Mountebanks, presenting hundreds of acts ranging from Todd Robbins to Dirty Martini to Tammy Faye Starlite to the Flying Karamazov Brothers. He has directed his own plays, revues and solo pieces at such venues as Joe’s Pub, La Mama, HERE, Dixon Place, Theater for the New City, the Ohio Theatre, the Brick, and 6 separate shows in the NY International Fringe Festival. In 2014 he produced and directed the smash-hit "I’ll Say She Is", the first ever revival of the Marx Brothers hit 1924 Broadway show in the NY International Fringe Festival.