Imperial Lodge of Elks

Overview

A purpose-built Harlem fraternal hall (designed by Vertner Tandy, New York's first licensed Black architect) that served as the primary venue for the underground Black and Latino queer ballroom scene from the early 1970s through the late 1980s, documented in Paris Is Burning (1990).

Imperial Lodge No. 127 of the Improved Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks of the World (I.B.P.O.E. of W.) was built at 160–164 West 129th Street between 1922 and 1924, designed by Vertner Woodson Tandy, New York State's first licensed African American architect, also responsible for St. Philip's Episcopal Church in Harlem. The four-story brick building was purpose-built for a Black fraternal organization with over 1,500 members, and its interior included a large dance hall with an elevated stage, a red U-shaped balcony with lacquered railings, a wood floor embossed with the word ELKS, and a mounted taxidermied elk head, details preserved in Jennie Livingston's footage and in Chantal Regnault's photographs of the scene. The lodge's lineage connects the earlier civic world of Harlem fraternal culture to the underground queer world it would eventually shelter. The building became the primary home of the post-1972 Black and Latino house ballroom circuit after Crystal LaBeija and Lottie LaBeija staged the first annual House of LaBeija Ball, dated by ballroom community history to 1972, at Up the Downstairs Case on West 115th Street, igniting the formal house system in protest of racial bias in white-organized drag pageants. By the mid-1970s, balls for the new houses (LaBeija, Corey, Pendavis, Ebony, St. Laurent, Ninja, Xtravaganza, and others) were regularly held at the Elks Lodge, which offered the scale, the stage, and, crucially, a Black-owned fraternal space that was available to rent. The building's interior geometry mapped closely onto the scoring structure balls required: a long runway, flanking observation areas, an elevated commentator's podium, a stage-side judges' panel. Participants compared it to a liturgical space. Music at balls of this era drew on disco, Hi-NRG, and emerging house tracks; DJ David DePino, a close associate of the downtown Paradise Garage world, served as DJ for the House of Xtravaganza's first ball at the Elks Lodge, bridging the Harlem circuit with the downtown club scene. By the late 1980s, the lodge had become unavailable for regular ball use (the precise reason is not documented in the sources reviewed) and the scene migrated downtown: DePino brokered a deal with the management of Tracks (Chelsea) to host the first downtown ball, the House of Xtravaganza Black & White Ball in 1988. Jennie Livingston had begun filming at the Elks Lodge in 1986, and the footage she shot there, of Pepper LaBeija, Willi Ninja, Dorian Corey, the House of Pendavis, and others competing and walking, became the documentary core of Paris Is Burning (1990), preserving the room's proportions and atmosphere for the record even as active ball use had already shifted. The houses competing in the lodge's prime included LaBeija, Corey, Pendavis, Ninja, Xtravaganza, Ebony, and St. Laurent. In 1997, the building was converted into the Faith Mission Christian Fellowship Church; original architectural elements (the balcony, the stage, the wood floor) are reported to remain beneath the church's use. The building appears in a landmark designation application (the PDF at squarespace.com references an 'Individual Landmark' application for 160 West 129th Street), and it is listed by the NYC LGBTQ Historic Sites Project. For roughly fifteen years the Elks Lodge anchored the underground ballroom world, a Black-owned, architecturally distinguished fraternal hall that preceded and shaped the more-documented downtown migration. This is where the house system consolidated.

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