Photos: Efrain Gonzalez Chronicled NYC's Seedy, Glorious West Side Nightlife
14 photos
<p>The whole area of the West Side Highway between Christopher St. and 14th St. was the sex workers' domain; they would work there at night...If you drove your car up the West Side Highway, they would be walking up the street, flashing parts of their bodies.</p>
<p>I created a whole series of images of that culture at night...their culture that existed in that area and in that time...Sometimes they'd pose for me - they'd strike a pose, or they'd just smile, or ignore me while I photographed away. There are others that were more violent, those ones I didn't get pictures of.</p>
<p>I suppose a lot of them succumbed to AIDS...a lot of them were gay or bisexual, then they were sex workers. And, you know, because a lot of them were trans women, that made them very difficult to employ, they had home problems...You can see in these photographs that some of these people are really on the edge. Really just surviving. And yet there's still this sense of power and self-expression.</p>
<p>The Hellfire club was a large sex club located in the Meatpacking District. And the Meatpacking District was a very low-rent area, and because these clubs opened up at night nobody really cared what they did there at night... This was an old vault that probably existed since before the Civil War. And it was located next to the Triangle building which was opened in 1874. Underneath was where the Hellfire was. It was an underground vault. You'd go down a flight of stairs, there was a coat check, and then you'd go into this very grungy, very dirty room, and it had brick arched ceilings. And you'd see the manhole covers that would go to the street itself. And in this room, in this club, this was the Hellfire.</p>
<p>It was a wide-open sex club for all sexes, all genders. You would have straight couples, you would have gays, lesbians, you would have transsexuals, you would have people of all kinds getting together and socializing. It was a nice place to get together and socialize, especially if you were into S&M. And before the 1980s you would have backrooms, with seating areas, and glory holes, and people would go into little cubicles and put a little chain up and then they would have a little cubicle all to themselves and they could do whatever it is that they wanted to do.</p>
<p>They moved out of that underground vault in '86 or so because it was getting to the point where it was structurally unsound...Lenny Waller (pictured left) was one of the owners. A group of men worked on the space and made it work. He was one of the men who ran the place, he basically worked the door, kept the peace. Anyway, he decided to reopen another space in the Triangle Building, the basement, and opened it as the Hellfire Club again. And it stayed there until 2002, when it finally succumbed. Market forces. Last I heard, it was a fancy restaurant. It was refinished. And you could still recognize the curved brick arches in the ceiling.</p>
<p>Tiny Tim came there once, but he got scared and ran away. John Wojtowicz (pictured above, the inspiration for Al Pacino's character from Dog Day Afternoon) would come. That was his whole life. He was the Dog Day Afternoon robber! He would introduce himself and say "I'm the Dog Day Afternoon robber" and pull out his press clippings and show them to people. "This was my last arrest. This was it, last week - see?"</p>
<p>Florent's was a very famous restaurant. All the young kids who were partying in the area â he decided he would open up a real French restaurant and offer real food to the club kids...A lot of the young kids who would go to the clubs and bop around would then go to the restaurant and exchange ideas. A scene from the movie Men in Black was filmed there. Amanda Lepore (pictured above at Florent) performed there â they had charity nights, people would go perform, sing, dance, to raise money for various transgender causes. Someone in one of my audiences said that on Bastille Day, they'd have a street festival. Florent lasted until 2008, then the rents got too high.</p>
The Vault was a four-story refrigeration building that was converted into a play space. And the people there did various things. There were lots of things: platforms to suspend people to spank them, a medical bed to have someone recline on, toll booths, chairs, all kinds of devices to immobilize or to hang people from or to sit down or lie upon to play with someone. Spank them, paddle them, fist them, whatever. And when the State decided to buy the building (to demolish it for an expansion of West Street), a lot of these things were very heavy and they were attached â nailed to the floor and the wall. So the owners very simply said â you have to buy these things because they're part of the building now. So the State had to add to the expense of the building these various accoutrements.
<p>In San Francisco there's a large street festival, a large gay/lesbian street festival, called Folsom Street. It's very popular, it's very bigâsomeone decided, what a nice idea, let's do the same thing in New York. So it opened up in the Meatpacking district in the early 1990s, it opened up, and it was a yearly festival located on 13th street between 9th Avenue and Washington, and it was a big street festival for all the big gay, lesbian, S&M organizations. Various organizations that dealt with the community, the S&M/leather community, the sex community would have tables there. You'd have vendorsâlike the Baroness, who'd sell latex clothing; people would sell whips, and paddles, and ball gags; people would sell sex toys. Everyone would show up on the street who was part of the community.</p>
<p>When the Meatpacking District began going upscale, it was pushed up to 28th St. Folsom Street East was there until last year, when it was shut down. Supposedly because of too much construction going on. I would tend to think the reason is that the very upscale condo builders simply don't want this class of people in their newly upscale neighborhood. When the High Line got renovated, there would be tourists looking down at what people were doing. There would be nudists. There would be men tied up naked being spanked. People in all kinds of costumes â leather, latex, drag. People would look down and you'd see this entire street full of people. And the year after that, they put up plywood barriers all along the High Line so that people couldn't see it. (Organizers say the event will return this year).</p>
<b>13th and Washington, 1994 vs. 2014.</b> William Gottleib was a land developer, and he bought large pieces of land in the Meatpacking District and West Village. And he had a reputation of not developing the land he bought. He didn't build, didn't clean, didn't renovate, but he would rent them out very cheap to artists and club owners. He had a reputation of being so cheap he had used paint to paint his buildings with. He died in 1999, and then his family began to sell off the property. That's when you started to see boutiques and stores coming in and refurbishing the spaces. 1999 is when you saw the change in the Meatpacking District.
<b>Sunday afternoon: 1980s vs. today.</b> Slowly, the businesses that used to exist there were pushed out because of the skyrocketing rents. In 2005, Apple decided to buy the Western Beef building located on the corner of 14th and 9th Avenue. Apple has so much money, they didn't bargain for the building, they just asked and didn't haggle and paid it. When Apple bought the store, all the other landlords decided, wow, and jacked up the prices everywhere. That's what caused Florent to lose their lease. Someone told me that back in the '90s, when the Western Beef building had been all closed down, there used to be a pot farm on the 2nd floor.
<p>On the West Side Highway.</p>