Bootleggers, Evicted Artists, and Nightclubs - 55 Grove Street

 

William A. Thompson, an attorney, tried his hand at speculative development in 1839 by erecting five brick-faced homes on the north side of Grove Street between Bleecker and West 4th Streets.  Two-and-a-half stories tall, their entrances would have sat above short stoops, and two dormers would have pierced their attics.

Thompson leased the houses, rather than selling them.  Something happened within the family of his original residents of 55 Grove Street.  On September 10, 1839, months (if not weeks) after their moving in, an auction of "the entire neat furniture of a family breaking up housekeeping," as described in the New York Morning Courier, was held.  The announcement said the furnishings were "in good order, and in use but a short time."

William Thompson continued to lease the houses to working class tenants over the coming decades.  Their professions included butchers, a carman, a shirt maker, a butter dealer, and various others.

Thompson died in 1873, and his daughters, Eunice and Frances, inherited the row.  It was about that time that the attics were raised to a full floor.  The women sold No. 55 in September 1889 to Francis A. Curry, initiating a rapid-fire turnover in owners.  By February 8, 1894, when Julius Klentzin purchased the house for $7,500 (about $282,000 in 2025 terms), it was being operated as a rooming house.

Among the tenants Klentzin inherited was Michael Kelly.  The 35-year-old drove a hansom and was in league with Louis Picus, the proprietor of the notorious Picus Hotel and a predator upon naïve travelers to the city, especially foreigners. 

On the morning of August 4, 1894, three Swedish brothers, Charles, John and Hendrick Zeimmerdahl, landed in New York and Michael Kelly and his cab was waiting at the dock.  The Evening World reported, "Kelly wanted to know where they were going.  They told him to the Hamburg dock."  Kelly posed as an agent of the Hamburg Line and said he would take them there for free.  Instead, he drove to the Picus Hotel where they had breakfast, "after which Kelly demanded $1.50 apiece to take them to the boat."  (The total would equal $170 today.)  The Evening World said, "They refused to give it, and Kelly started to whip them."  A passing policeman stepped in.  Kelly was arrested and that afternoon was sentenced to six months at Blackwell's Island.

Renting a room here in 1922 was James Grasso, a gangster and bootlegger.  On the afternoon of February 23, he entered the Cafe Venezia at Kenmare and Elizabeth Streets with Jerry Ruberto (aka Jerry the Wolf), Joseph Pagano and Joseph Recardo.  The Cafe Venezia had recently been owned by rival bootleggers Ernesto and Silvio Melchiore.  Eight weeks earlier, Ernesto's body had been found in Coney Island, "nearly decapitated," according to The New York Times, and six weeks after that, Silvio was gunned down in the restaurant.

Grasso and his comrades took a table.  The New York Herald reported, "Friends gathered to wish the new proprietors success."  A cabaret singer was in the midst of her act when shooting began.  Jerry Ruberto, shot through the heart, died instantly.  The New York Times reported that Joseph Pagano was shot through the neck, and James Grasso "was dying from a bullet in the abdomen."  The fourth man was picked up staggering along Kenmare Street, injured.

More pleasant news about a tenant that year was the marriage of Kenneth R. Edwards to Leila Lewis in August.  Born in Toledo, Ohio, Edwards had arrived in New York in 1920 as a free-lance writer and cartoonist.  The New York Times said, "He produced one of the earliest animated cartoons, entitled 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears.'"  Edwards would join Eastman Kodak Company in 1928 and become an advisor on educational and other non-theatrical films.

Former actor Keith Smerage shared a room here with Philip Towne, a government clerk, in 1930.  Ten years earlier, Smerage was attending Harvard University when he was one of 32 students suspected of being homosexual.  The university established a "court" that interviewed the men and all 32 were expelled.  With his educational plans derailed, Smerage turned to acting, but in September 1930 had not found a role in a year and a half.  He took odd jobs, the last one being a bus boy in a Greenwich Village restaurant.  He lost that job in July.

On September 7, Philip Towne returned home to find Smerage dead "of gas asphyxiation," as reported by The New York Times.  He "found the cracks about the doors and windows stuffed with paper and four jets open in the kitchen stove."  (Incidentally, two other of the 32 expelled Harvard students committed suicide.)

In 1934, architect Sidney Daub was commissioned to renovate the house.  The stoop was removed and a restaurant called the Romany was installed in the basement and first floors.  The second and third floors became a duplex apartment.

An understated sign for The Romany hangs on the facade in 1941.  image via the NYC Dept of Records & Information Services.

Renting the apartment from Vincenzo Di Martini in 1949 were Evsa and Lisette Model.  When they married in 1937, Lisette was already a well-known photographer and Evsa a respected artist and member of the Cercle et Carré (Circle and Square) with Piet Mondrian.  They moved to New York City in 1938 and Lisette's photographs were soon regularly published in Harper's Bazaar.  Her work was exhibited in the Museum of Modern Art's 1948 "In and Out of Focus" and "Fifty Photographers" exhibitions.

In June 1949, the couple temporarily went West--Lisette to Reno, Nevada on an assignment for the Ladies Home Journal, and Evsa to teach at the California School of Arts in San Francisco.  Before they left, they paid their rent through September.

On the afternoon of September 26, 1949, Mrs. Michael Lewis, the owner of the Charles-Fourth Gallery, took a walk with her two children.  When she came to 55 Grove Street, she "saw Mr. Model's pictures littering the sidewalk in front of the Grove Street house, in a jumble of furniture, and other household articles and camera equipment," according to The New York Times.  Di Martini was there, too.  Mrs. Lewis reminded him that the couple was out of town.  "Listen, lady, I put notices up," he said.

Mrs. Lewis rushed to a telephone.  Within an hour, "a circle of the Models' friends had gathered."  John Morris from the photographic department of the Ladies Home Journal had hired a moving van and all the Models' things were transferred from the city marshal's van and put into storage.  Among those "in the rescue squad" were writer and art critic Elizabeth McCausland, photographer Berenice Abbott, Dorothy Wheelock of Harper's Bazaar, and Dee Knapp of the Museum of Modern Art.  The Times said that two of Evsa Model's paintings were destroyed and "six or seven damaged."

Two years later, a renovation created a two-story cabaret space in the basement and ground floor.  Called the Upstairs/Downstairs, its patrons could choose between the lower level for drinking, or the upper level for cabaret entertainment.

By the early 1960s, the name had been changed to the Duplex.  The entertainment columns regularly reported on the acts offered here.  On March 3, 1964, for instance, John Wilson of The New York Times wrote, "in a dark and tiny second-floor room in Greenwich Village--Upstairs at the Duplex, 55 Grove Street--a personable, tuxedo-clad singer, David London, gradually changes into the traditional circus clown as he goes through his program of songs.  He plays it for wonderment."

Cue magazine, on February 5, 1966, called Upstairs at the Duplex, "one of Greenwich Village's most intimate night clubs."  The Villager reminisced on December 11, 1978, "The Duplex is more laid-back than the other Grove St. establishments.  It has had its up and downs over the past 15 years.  Once a showcase for comedians such as Dick Cavett and Woody Allen, the Duplex today is a piano bar downstairs...and a nightclub upstairs."

In 1990, Quynhi Pham leased the building, renaming the club Rose's Turn after his mother, who was called Rose, and inspired by the song "Rose's Turn" from Gypsy.  But a change of proprietorship did not change the offering: a piano bar in the lower level and the cabaret upstairs.

Rose's Turn became a favorite haunt of gays, not only for the camaraderie of the regular patrons around the piano bar, but because of the unexpected celebrities who stopped into the upstairs venue.  Phan told Anthony Ramirez of The New York Times in the summer of 2007, "many famous artists had come to visit Rose's Turn then felt moved to jump on stage and perform, including Ms. [Liza] Minnelli and Ms. [Olivia] Newton-John."  He said, "There were so many people...I can't remember them all."

It ended in 2007.  On July 19 Ramirez wrote, "For 56 years, since it opened during the Truman administration, 55 Grove Street in the West Village has been a piano bar, cabaret and comedy club for the quick-witted and full-throated."  During that time, he wrote:

Woody Allen, Dick Cavett, Hal Holbrook, Barbra Streisand, Joan Rivers, Richard Pryor--and later Liza Minnelli and Olivia Newton-John--swung open the double doors, stepped down seven careful steps to the piano bar or climbed the dark stairs, narrow as a ship's ladder, to the second-floor cabaret.

The article said the new owner had paid $3.5 million "to take over the three-story brick building with the peeling white paint."  Ramirez said the future of 55 Grove Street "will not include a piano bar."

S. R. Gambrel, an interior design company, renovated the three lower floors to its showroom and offices.  The top floor was converted to a one-bedroom apartment.  The building was next purchased in 2014 for $9.1 million.  On January 28,  2015, The New York Times reported that 55 Grove Street "will be the location of a new restaurant, as yet unnamed, from Alessandro Borgognone and Daisuke Nakazawa of Sushi Nakazawa."  The proposed owners, reported the article, said "that it would not be Japanese."

The prospective restaurant did not materialize.  Instead it became Little Owl the Townhouse, an event space.  Unidentifiable as the Federal-style house of 1839, the building continues to change and add to its remarkable history.

photographs by the author