The Anvil

Overview

After-hours gay leather bar and performance space in the far west Meatpacking District, notorious for drag and sex exhibitions, a launching pad for the Village People's Felipe Rose, a filming location for Friedkin's Cruising, and an early voluntary casualty of New York's 1985 AIDS-era venue closures.

The building at 500 West 14th Street, a three-story triangular structure along the West Side Highway, constructed in 1908 as the Strand Hotel and serving sailors and waterfront workers, passed through several iterations before becoming The Anvil. It was Danny's Bar by June 1972, a leather bar called the Meatrack by January 1973, and was renamed the Anvil in 1974 (sources differ on the month) under the ownership of Alan Goldstein of Queens, operating through the Liberation Social Club (incorporated 1976) as a private membership organization specifically to sidestep State Liquor Authority oversight. A bouncer at the 14th Street entrance enforced a preference for masculine presentation; most patrons arrived after 4 a.m., when the club properly opened as a de facto after-hours space. The ground floor held a rectangular bar, a black-painted dance floor, and a performance stage, where go-go boys danced and explicit live sex exhibitions took place in the early years, later joined by drag shows and variety performances. A staircase led down to a secondary bar with a large screen projecting adult films and, behind it, a cave-like backroom for sexual contact. Disco music anchored the dancefloor from the start; by the early 1980s, the Damron Guide's listing noted both the 'action' and the 'wild back room' as the club's defining features. The Anvil's performance calendar was more varied than its notoriety for the backroom suggested. Ruby Rims, hired in January 1977 as the club's first drag performer (recruited, she recalled, as a 'goof' by the man known as Gary who ran the door) performed two sets nightly (at 3 a.m. and 5 a.m.) for $50 per set plus tips, eventually becoming a resident. Felipe Rose (the dancer who would become the 'Indian' in the Village People) was working as a dancer and bartender at the Anvil, performing in Native American regalia, when French producer Jacques Morali and executive producer Henri Belolo spotted him there and recruited him as the group's founding member, reportedly in 1977. Bill Bahlman DJed at the Anvil during the early 1980s, having established himself on the New Wave circuit at Club Hurrah; he brought New Wave Nights to the room before leaving to co-found the Lavender Hill Mob and, in March 1987, ACT UP. Bernard Zette (the drag performer later cast in Bright Lights, Big City (1988) and Uli Edel's Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989)) is named in oral-history accounts among the performers on the main stage. The club drew a celebrity gallery: Andy Warhol was a documented visitor, Freddie Mercury attended frequently between approximately 1980 and 1982, Lou Reed and Rainer Werner Fassbinder were noted patrons, and Truman Capote and Princess Lee Radziwill were cited in oral histories (though these specific claims are unverified). Director William Friedkin shot interior scenes at the Anvil during production of Cruising (1980), filming there and at the Ramrod and Eagle's Nest; accounts differ on the Mineshaft, which by most tellings refused the production (its scenes were staged at the Hellfire Club), and the Eagle's Nest eventually barred the crew. In the context of New York's 1970s and early 1980s gay geography, the Anvil occupied a particular niche: less regimented than the Mineshaft's strict dress-code leather protocols, more overtly sexual than the disco palaces uptown, and more working-class in atmosphere than the Saint or Studio 54. The Meatpacking District block it anchored, alongside the Mineshaft two blocks south on Washington Street, and the earlier Hellfire Club, constituted the densest node of publicly operating gay sexual subculture in the city before AIDS. The historian Joel Brodsky, in his 1993 retrospective ethnography of the Mineshaft published in the Journal of Homosexuality, situated these venues within a sociocultural logic of liminal erotic behavior, housed in institutions the post-Stonewall generation had built for itself, run for profit and outside the SLA's reach. The Anvil closed voluntarily on November 9, 1985, two days after the New York City Department of Health shuttered the Mineshaft on November 7, the first forced closure of a gay venue under the city's new AIDS-era emergency regulations, which had been added to the State Sanitary Code in October 1985 and permitted immediate closure of any establishment facilitating 'high-risk sexual activities.' The Anvil's preemptive closure, before an order arrived, has been read both as a gesture of solidarity with the Mineshaft and as a tactical acknowledgment that the room's operations were identical in character. The Liberty Inn, the pay-by-the-hour hotel that had operated in the building since the late 1960s, kept the address for nearly four more decades, closing in February 2023; Hyundai bought the property that July for $22.5 million, reported at the time as the highest per-square-foot sale in the Meatpacking District's history. No plaque marks the site.