Regular GVDP visitors are familiar with my moaning/ groaning re the rapidly vanishing architecture of real New York. Numerous Village haunts are closing, but the Triangle Social Club, where many a mafia murder was planned, remains spookily alive. Contrary to public opinion (though crime rates are down), organized crime still lurks below the surface in the naked city.
WIKI: "
Vincent "The Chin" Gigante (
March 29,
1928 –
December 19,
2005) was a New York mobster who headed the
Genovese crime family. Dubbed "the Oddfather" by the press, Gigante often wandered the streets of
Greenwich Village, Manhattan in his bathrobe and slippers, mumbling incoherently to himself, in what police characterized as an elaborate act.
"Gigante ran a crew from
Greenwich Village, Manhattan, that was formerly overseen by
Vito Genovese and later
Anthony "Tony Bender" Strollo. Gigante's crew was based out of the
Triangle Social Club, located at 208 Sullivan Street, but also met with fellow crew members at the Dante Social Club at 81 McDougal Street, and the Panel Social Club at 208 Thompson Street. Besides those locations, Gigante met with gangsters and business associates at his mother's apartment located at 225 Sullivan Street."
These days the tourists and B&Ts roaming the Village have no idea what happened on Sullivan Street. They only see this ominous facade, padlocked for years (I did see the old mobsters drinking expresso there in the late 80s) though it is regularly painted black -- the building no doubt still owned and controlled by the mob. Oddly enough, an old style mob execution, of sorts, occurred directly in front of the building in March of last year, when an auxillary police officer was gunned down right on the stoop (as reported in Gothamist http://gothamist.com/2007/03/15/cop_shot_on_hou.php). Coincidence? You decide.
NYT: "THE KELLER HOTEL, an old seaman’s inn, has seen a few tides come and go. An Irish coal merchant constructed it in the late 1890s along a salty stretch of the Greenwich Village waterfront, at a time when the docks there were some of the busiest in the world. During the Depression, the Keller served as a flophouse for out-of-work sailors, who boozed and brawled in its ground-floor saloon. As the decades passed and economic forces pushed ships toward other ports, the West Side docks rotted, the Village deteriorated and a new clientele moved into the Keller. By the 1980s, the city was housing indigents upstairs, while the downstairs tenant was a gay leather bar, reputedly New York’s oldest. Then, in 1985, a real estate investor named William Gottlieb purchased the property for $1 million."
Since then the Keller has sat vacant while neighboring buildings were granted landmark status. I love the old Keller ruin. Look closely at the fine architectural detail (can you spot the 666?), you can almost smell the ghosts of a thousand lives that passed through the Keller's doors. Reportedly the birthplace of disco, the Village People photographed their debut album cover here. Now, Keller's ghosts whisper as you walk by the corner of West and Barrow, their secrets most likely awaiting the wrecking ball.
