Cubbyhole

Overview

West Village queer bar at 281 West 12th Street, bar on this site since 1987 (as DT's Fat Cat), renamed Cubbyhole in 1994 when Tanya Saunders bought the name from the prior Cubby Hole at 438 Hudson, one of the city's most durable lesbian and queer women's rooms.

The bar at 281 West 12th Street has maintained a continuous lesbian and queer women's identity since 1987, when Tanya Saunders and Debbie Fierro opened it as DT's Fat Cat ('DT' for their first initials). The room was small and neighborhood-scale, with no dance floor and a jukebox in place of a booth. It ran through the late 1980s as one of the West Village's few bars for lesbians and queer women. In 1994, Saunders negotiated the purchase of the name 'Cubbyhole' from Elaine Romagnoli, who had operated The Cubby Hole (two words, a distinct name) at 438 Hudson Street from 1983 until 1990. Romagnoli had closed the Hudson Street bar and opened Crazy Nanny's at 21 Seventh Avenue South; by acquiring the name, Saunders absorbed the Cubby Hole's community association and lineage into her own room, creating a deliberate continuity of West Village lesbian bar identity across two addresses. The address at 438 Hudson had not stood empty: Lisa Cannistraci had opened Henrietta Hudson there in 1991, so that both 438 Hudson and 281 West 12th operated as lesbian bars into the 2000s. The Cubbyhole's interior became one of the bar's defining features: a ceiling dense with kitsch objects (pennants, stuffed animals, signs, decorations accumulated over decades) in a room deliberately scaled for intimacy rather than volume. The bar has no dance floor; the room is organized around conversation and the jukebox. Tanya Saunders died on April 29, 2018, at 82; she left the bar to Lisa Menichino, who had bartended at Cubbyhole since 2000. By the early 2020s, the Cubbyhole and Henrietta Hudson were among fewer than two dozen lesbian bars operating in the United States; the Lesbian Bar Project (an advocacy campaign launched in 2020; its documentary short followed in 2021) documented both rooms as survivors of a collapse that had reduced the country's lesbian bar total from over two hundred in the 1980s to a tiny handful. During the 2020–2021 pandemic closure, Cubbyhole launched a community fundraising effort that kept the bar financially viable through the forced shutdown. A lesbian bar has operated continuously at 281 West 12th Street since Saunders opened DT's Fat Cat in 1987, under two names and two owners.