The Duchess

Overview

The defining lesbian bar of 1970s–early-1980s New York: a small room with a jukebox and a dance floor at 70 Grove Street where a racially and economically diverse crowd found refuge from street-level hostility, and which then cycled through four successor names at the same address until the early 1990s.

The Duchess occupied the ground floor of a 1899 tenement at the apex of Grove Street and Seventh Avenue South, a block inside the dense queer geography of the West Village, a short block from the Stonewall Inn. From its opening in 1972 through 1982 it was among the most prominent women's bars in New York, described in contemporary guidebooks as having 'a friendly and relaxed atmosphere, popular with movement women' and a 'relaxed feminist atmosphere.' The physical space was modest: a small dance floor and a jukebox near the entrance were its primary draws, augmented by Sunday buffets and table service. What it offered structurally, a room not run by the Mafia, where bathroom policing of the kind endemic to earlier bars did not occur, and where women could hold hands or be openly queer without staff surveillance, made it qualitatively different from what had preceded it. It attracted a racially and economically diverse crowd for its era, not easily reducible to a single class or subculture of lesbian New York. The bar existed in ongoing tension with the New York State Liquor Authority. Around 1980, the Duchess lost its liquor license after the SLA determined that refusing to serve men constituted unlawful discrimination, an application of anti-discrimination law that inverted its stated intent and was publicly contested by feminist advocates. Fran Greenfield of the feminist newspaper WomaNews drew the distinction precisely: 'On one side there are privileged and powerful groups who use their clubs to keep 'social undesirables' clearly on the outside. On the other side there are the people denied privilege and power who rely on their own clubs as a haven in an otherwise hostile world.' The bar continued to serve alcohol despite the revocation, and on September 8, 1982, two undercover officers from the NYPD 'NYC Morals Division' arrested the bartender and bouncer. That arrest ended the Duchess's decade-long run under that name. An attempt to reopen the space as a juice bar without a liquor license failed, but the address held its character. Around 1983 the Grove Café reopened in the same room with a comparable atmosphere; by 1989 it had renamed itself Duchess II, then Grove Club in 1990, then Pandora's Box in 1992. Under the Grove Club name a guidebook called it 'one of the most famous women's bars in the entire world, known as one hang-out where you can still have a good feminist conversation.' Pandora's Box drew a crowd described by its manager Cynthia Russo as predominantly Black and Latina, and The complaints that followed (noise violations, a petition signed by 108 residents, Department of Environmental Protection noise fines exceeding $23,000, and a patron firing an unlicensed pistol into the bar's ceiling) were, in Russo's account, driven by anti-lesbian, anti-Black, and anti-Latina bias rather than by the bar's conduct. The New York Civil Liberties Union is reported to have taken an interest in the case. The space closed as Pandora's Box around 1993, ending more than twenty years of continuous lesbian bar use at 70 Grove Street. The Duchess became one of the most-recalled lesbian spaces of its era in personal testimony. Cartoonist Alison Bechdel described the bar's significance in terms of embodied relief: 'There was a lot of routine anti-gay hostility on the street. Even in Sheridan Square on a weekend night you'd get hassled for holding hands. But then you'd step past the bouncer at the Duchess, and you were home free. It afforded me the space to just be, with my guard down, and that was salvational.' During the June 27, 1982 Pride March, months before the Duchess's police closure, the Lesbian Herstory Archives contingent gathered in front of the bar with a banner reading 'In memory of the voices we have lost' and placards bearing photographs of lesbian forebears, Radclyffe Hall and Eleanor Roosevelt among them (some descriptions also name Mabel Hampton, who led the Archives' contingent that year); Barbara Alper's photograph of the moment is one of the few archival images that directly places the bar in a visible institutional history. The building at 70 Grove Street subsequently housed a vitamin store and, as of the early 2010s, a cupcake shop.