May 25th, 2016
Irish brewer James Everard opened the Everard Baths in 1888 in an old renovated church building. He had bought it in 1886 and turned it into a music hall known as “The Regent.” It flopped a few months later. It reopened again as “The Fifth Avenue Music Hall,” but that, too, closed soon after. Everard renovated it again, and on May 7, 1888, he opened it as a Turkish bath.
Everard died in 1913, and the property was sold to Meyer Smolowitz, who in 1921 sold it for the princely sum of $175,000 to a lawyer by the name of Abraham Harawitz. Harawitz announced that he would spend another $100,000 on renovations for the “bathhouse and dormitories. By then, it had already become popular with gay men and picked up the nickname “Everhard.” Police raided the premises in 1919 and arrested nine customers and the manager for lewd behavior, and arrested fifteen more in another raid in 1920. But despite those raids, the Everard Baths remained a major gay venue through the succeeding decades. Well-known patrons over the years included Gore Vidal, Rudolf Nureyev, Lorenz Hart, Truman Capote and Ned Rorem.
In 1977, a fire broke out in the Everard, killing nine customers and injuring ten more (see below). The fire destroyed the top two floors of the four-story building. After the building was rebuilt, the Everard reopened in 1979, and remained open for another seven years. It finally closed for good in April 1986 in a city-wide campaign by New York mayor Ed Koch to shut down all of the city’s bathhouses in response to the AIDS epidemic. The building is still there and houses the Yung Kee Wholesale Center.
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Raymond
May 25th, 2016
It is my understanding that Everard’s remained outside of police view in the 1960s and ’70s because it was either owned or managed by the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association of the City of New York, largest police union in the city.
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