Before Club Cumming and the Nuyorican, the Beer Flowed at a Prohibition-Era Church

This week, we continue our series of deep dives into the histories of storied addresses.

There’s no sign announcing the name of the establishment on the ground floor of 505 East 6th Street. There are only two silver C’s on the receded wood and glass door, and a chandelier hanging from the ceiling in the foyer, where a small bulletin board announces the month’s events at Club Cumming.

Inside the long, narrow bar, the walls are decorated with larger-than-life drawings of queer cabaret characters. On a recent night, a middle-aged woman with cropped blond hair and black plastic-framed glasses danced to reggaeton with a bald man while holding a fluffy white Pomeranian in the crook of her arm. The patrons of the club are of all ages, styles and, presumably, sexualities.

In a neighborhood known variously over the years as Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany; the Lower East Side; the East Village; Alphabet City; and Loisaida, the building at 505 East 6th Street has housed the city’s immigrants, its working poor, its hippies and its hipsters. And while they lived in the building, well, they partied. They’re partying still.

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It’s likely that 505 East 6th Street was first built around 1850, when tenement housing sprung up on the south side of Tompkins Square, a park that would immediately became a focal point of political unrest and protest. The tenements were crowded and the families living there were poor immigrants from Germany. The 1860 Census shows that nine families lived in the building at that point, 41 people in all. There were two Geisler families with a servant, along with the Mahars, the Dornbergers, the Schiffners, the Hgkes, the Rmages, the Drahers and the Folzses. Most had immigrated from Bavaria and other German-speaking areas and among them there were tailors, bakers, carpenters, button makers and clerks.

In the public space on the ground floor was a saloon. By 1866, Henry William Blair’s “Map of New York City to Accompany The Temperance Movement or the Conflict Between Man & Alcohol” records 10,168 “saloons or places where liquor was obtainable” in Manhattan, including one at 505 East 6th Street. There were four more alongside it on the north side of 6th Street in the block between Avenues A and B. Another seven served customers on the south side of the street. Little Germany, needless to say, was dense with saloons, and had a higher concentration of establishments that served alcohol than the rest of the island.

Despite the city’s Blue Laws, the Germans of Kleindeutschland found a workaround that allowed them to drink legally on Sundays. They held what they dubbed “Sunday Sacred Concerts,” during which they played sacred music in some of the saloons—some would even rename themselves as churches—and described the beer as sacramental, which gave it cover under freedom of religious expression.  

A reporter for the New-York Daily Tribune decided to investigate. On Sunday, May 6, 1860, he went to both The Odeon and Deutsches Volks Theatre to experience this sacred ritual, which he recounted in the next day’s paper. The owner, Gustavus Lindenmueller, told the reporter that he was not selling beer, but was a preacher who, in exchange for the congregation helping to “pay their share toward the expenses of the church,” would “treat them to a little physical as well as spiritual refreshment.” The reporter describes the Sunday scene:

Over the door a novel title lately adopted by G. L. [Gustavus Lindenmueller], with a view to the evasion of the Sunday law, announced that the establishment was the “Church of the German Shakers,” and that “none but members were admitted.”

On entering, it appeared that the German Shakers have a more peculiar, and apparently a more cheerful mode of conducting their religious exercises than their American namesakes. The worshippers, both male and female, instead of sitting uprightly and reverently in conventional church-ships, were sitting face to face around altars, very similar in structure and usage to the wooden tables usually found in lager beer saloons, partaking of an amber-colored fluid from broad-bottomed goblets, listening to music discoursed by a brass band in the chancel, and only shaking with hearty Scandinavian laughter.

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The 1880 Census shows 10 families living in the building and indicates that the saloon downstairs at that point belonged to John Maisenholder, an immigrant from the southwest German region of Swabia, who had been on the lease since 1872. The rest of the building’s residents, 37 individuals in all, also were of German origin, either first or second generation. The Maisenholders were the only family that had a servant, the other breadwinners were tailors, cloak makers, tinsmiths, gilders, waiters, porters, painters and clerks.

By the 1900 Census, conditions in the building had greatly improved as only five families lived in the building at that point, including not more than 19 inhabitants. The Maisenholders were still in place with John, the head of the family, now described as a wine merchant instead of a saloonkeeper. The other families were all German, but only Louisa Grobe, a 64-year-old widow, and Elizabeth Hopf, a 72-year-old widow, did not speak English.

In 1902, Minnie Oberloskamp, a German immigrant who lived across the street, in No. 506 East 6th Street, bought No. 505. Her husband, Julius, is recorded as a barkeeper or in some way related to the saloon business in the censuses of 1900, 1905 and 1910, so it’s probable they kept a bar in the ground floor of the building.

As their lot improved, and the German neighbors began to move to the Upper East Side to Yorkville, conditions in the building worsened again. By 1910, poorer, more recent immigrants from Eastern Europe were living in very crowded conditions in the building, with the number of residents rising to 35. Among the Hungarian immigrants, there was a Yiddish-speaking grocery store owner and his large family, a laundry worker, and a cook. There were also Austrians and Russians who lived with their families and boarders.

In 1920, the Oberloskamps sold the building back to the trustees of John Jacob Astor, who had first bought the plot on which the building stands back in 1803. That was the same year Prohibition of alcohol was introduced, and could possibly account for why the Oberloskamps sold the building and moved to Queens, which is where they appear in the 1925 census.

The 1920 Census shows there were still 34 people living in No. 505, including families and boarders from Russia, Hungary, Austria. There was an orchestral musician and a porter at a saloon, among others. The 1930 Census shows eight families and two boarders living in the building, for a total of 29 people. There was an operator at a men’s clothes factory, a blacksmith and a fisherman; others worked in restaurants and barber shops. The majority of adults continued to be foreign-born, mostly from Austria and Hungary, but with a new addition from Italy, albeit married to an Austrian.

By 1938, conditions in the building had deteriorated to the point that the newspaper, the Daily Worker, reported on Feb. 4 that a group of residents staged a rent strike because the violation of the dwelling laws were so flagrant. The Sixth Street Investing Corporation, which had bought the building two years prior, served them notices of dispossession. The tenants went to the East Side Tenant’s League for help, taking their case to court to demand proper repairs, a janitor service and adjustment for the excessively high rents they had been paying.

The 1940 Census shows only 14 people were now living at No. 505, a major improvement from the maximum total of 37 that had been living there in 1880. Now, it was only the Martinettis and their son, he was born in New York and her in Austria; the Groswalds, an elderly couple from Romania; Sarah Feinman, a widow from Russia and her adult children; Jenny Jeger, a widow from Austria and her adult children; and the Zeligs from Hungary with their baby daughter. There was a post office clerk, a timekeeper at the hospital, a counter girl and a chef at a restaurant. A year later, the New York Times would report that one of eight men arrested for stealing $250,000 in dresses and furs was a resident of 505 East 6th Street: William Friedmann, a 38-year-old chauffeur known as “Little Willie.”

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In the post-World War II period, Latino and African-American people flooded the area. And in the 1960s, came artists and hippies escaping from the rising rents of Greenwich Village. That’s when the area became known as the East Village in an attempt to clean its reputation. By the 1970s, the New York Times described the neighborhood as a place of “three- and four‐family row tenements” that was “not quite rundown, but does appear neglected.”

Puerto Ricans, who had been trickling to New York since World War II, had moved into the Lower East Side and begun calling the area Loisaida (pronounced lo-ee-SIDE-uh), a phonetic interpretation coined by poet Bimbo Rivas to mimic how native Spanish speakers might pronounce Lower East Side.  Around Halloween in 1975, another poet, Miguel Algarín, moved the poetry encounters that he had been hosting in his apartment to the building in No. 505. And what until that moment had been an Irish pub called the Sunshine Cafe became the Nuyorican Poets Café.

The New York Times of May 14, 1976, described the café as having half a dozen tables on the left side, and a book-decorated bar with high chairs on the right, dim amber lights, paintings of neighborhood artists on the walls and flower pots hanging inside the unpainted window that looks on the sidewalk. The purported idea behind the café was to broaden the audience and appeal of poetry. The Times called it “a new, intensely cathartic poetry that was born on New York City’s streets.”

The poets in this group included Lucky Cienfuegos, Miguel Piñero, Bimbo Rivas and Jorge Brandon, who had lived in the neighborhood and had been reciting his poetry on the street since the 1940s. Many of the writers who were part of the Nuyorican group protested against the Vietnam War and were involved with the Civil Rights movement, the Black Panthers and the Young Lords. By 1981, the café moved to its current, larger location at 236 East 3rd Street.

In the late 1980s, the public establishment at No. 505 was The Chameleon, where pop and jazz bands performed and the city’s homeless artists exhibited their work. In the mid-1990s came Wonder Bar, which advertised itself as a place for “gay men, lesbians and their admirers.” In 1998, the New York Post described the bar this way: “Everything from the checkerboard floors, maroon velvet cushions and grey-and-yellow striped walls is trippy. The deejay spins New Age dance tracks from an elevated hole in the wall every day from 9:30 p.m. until 4 a.m.”

Even for the yogi who gave free yoga lessons in Apartment No. 7, and whose picture doing a Scorpio forearm stand was supposedly taken by Robert Mapplethorpe, the neighborhood vibes were not always too positive. In 1996, the New York Times reported that neighbors complained of a foul smell emanating from a first floor apartment and sent the superintendent to check. He walked inside the unlocked door and found the space ransacked and the bodies of a man and a woman. The superintendent said he had not seen the tenant for at least two weeks.

The bars on the ground floor continued to cater to the city’s gay community. Until recently, the Soviet-themed Eastern Bloc occupied the space, where, apparently, stapling your underwear to the ceiling gave you the right to a free drink.

On Sept. 13 this year, the space relaunched as Club Cumming, in honor of its new owner, Scottish actor Alan Cumming, who wanted to create a place that continued the vibe of the improvised parties he threw in his Broadway dressing room during the 2014 revival of “Cabaret.”

On Nov. 30, revelers gathered to raise funds for Puerto Rico. Performer and visual artist José Rivera Jr., came onto the tiny stage at the back of the club and sang a mournful pop song while playing a guitar with his back to the audience. Rivera, who is of Puerto Rican descent, wore a white cotton kaftan and a black thong that he would later show when he took off his clothes and twisted on the stage floor. In the audience, actress Lili Taylor laughed out loud and Cumming scolded the patrons who annoyed other guests by taking selfies with their camera flash on.