23 November 2021

Hotel Astor 1910s-60s Gay Bar – Phantom Dancer 23 Nov 2021

Greg Poppleton's Phantom Dancer swing jazz radio show

Hotel Astor in New York City, the source of many a big band broadcast on The Phantom Dancer is this week’s Phantom Dancer feature. Hotel Astor was in the Times Square area of Manhattan, New York City. It was open from 1904 until its demolition in 1967, the same year Sydney lost its home for name dance bands, The Trocadero. Starting in the 1910s, the Astor Bar acquired a reputation as a gay meeting place, where gay patrons were both accepted and extorted.

LISTEN to this Phantom Dancer mix (online after 2pm AEST, Tuesday 23 November) and two years of Phantom Dancer mixes online at, at https://2ser.com/phantom-dancer/

I’m Greg Poppleton, The Phantom Dancer producer and presenter every week on 107.3 2SER radio Sydney since 1985.

Here’s some exterior Hotel Astor footage from 1961…

SAFE GAY BAR

Beginning in the 1910s, the Astor Bar of the Hotel Astor acquired a reputation as a gay meeting place. During World War II, the Astor Bar was one of three American hotel bars “world famous for their wartime ambience”, alongside the Top of the Mark at the Mark Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco, and the men’s bar at the Los Angeles Biltmore.

Gay patrons at the Astor Bar were welcomed, allotted an entire side of the oval bar, and expected to be discreet (by the standards of the time). Thus “the Astor maintained its public reputation as an eminently respectable Times Square rendezvous, while its reputation as a gay rendezvous and pickup bar assumed legendary proportions.” The bar was further immortalized in Cole Porter’s song “Well, Did You Evah!”, which includes the line, “Have you heard that Mimsie Starr / Just got pinched in the Astor Bar?”

Here is Tommy Dorsey & Bunny Berrigan broadcasting from The Hotel Astor Roof in 1940…

GAY EXTORTION

In the 1960s, prominent gay men at the Astor ran the risk of extortion. The extortion racked was busted by the NYPD and FBI, the first case law enforcement in the US, worked to bring justice to gay victims of crime.

The following story is from Slate. You can read the full story here: https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/07/the-chickens-and-the-bulls-the-rise-and-incredible-fall-of-a-vicious-extortion-ring-that-preyed-on-prominent-gay-men-in-the-1960s.html

The NYPD and the FBI, working in parallel (and sometimes at odds), would uncover and break a massive gay extortion ring whose viciousness and criminal flair was without precedent.

The Astor Hotel in Times Square, notorious for the young men who lounged on the “meat rack” outside it, and for the circular bar in the Orangerie which was popular with theatre people, was one of the main venues across the US where this extortion occurred, labeled ‘Chicken and Bulls’.

Impersonating corrupt vice-squad detectives, members of this ring, known in police parlance as bulls, used young, often underage men known as chickens to successfully blackmail closeted pillars of the establishment. The chickens employed by the ring had an exceptionally sharp sense of what we now call gaydar.”

In almost every case, after making contact, the chicken would accompany the mark up to his room, or suggest another hotel where they could go. Once in the room, one of two scenarios would follow…

In some cases, the bulls would wait until the two men had gotten themselves into a compromising position before bursting into the room and identifying themselves as vice squad detectives, capitalizing on the fear, panic and surprise they induced in the victim to then extort the victim.

Among the prominent men extorted by the ring were a navy admiral, two generals, a U.S. congressman, a prominent surgeon, an Ivy League professor, a prep school headmaster, and several well-known actors, singers, and television personalities.

The ring operated for almost a decade, victimized thousands, and took in at least $2 million. When he announced in 1966 that the ring had been broken up, Manhattan DA Frank Hogan said the victims had all been shaken down “on the threat that their homosexual proclivities would be exposed unless they paid for silence.”

In almost every case, after making contact, the chicken would accompany the mark up to his room, or suggest another hotel where they could go instead. Once in the room, one of two scenarios would follow…

EXTORTION SCENARIO 1

The bulls would wait until the two men had gotten themselves into a compromising position before bursting into the room and identifying themselves as vice squad detectives, capitalizing on the fear, panic, and surprise they induced in the victim as they initiated what they referred to as the play.

The bulls would explain the penalties for violating sodomy laws or corrupting a minor, then demand an outright bribe, or as they did to the Princeton professor, suggest that the victim pay “bail money” as a way of avoiding making his arrest public, or prison. In some cases the bulls might induce a payoff by putting a victim together in a room with another man they pretended to have arrested for the same thing elsewhere in the hotel. That other man might say something like: “Hey, I can’t afford to be arrested. I’m going to offer them money, what about you?” Having the victim induce the payoff, rather than demand the money outright, lowered the criminals’ exposure in court.

In some instances after an “arrest,” the bogus cops would park their “unmarked” vehicle outside a police station, ostensibly to check whether the duty captain might OK dropping the charges if a payment was arranged, which tended to encourage the victim to comply. In other more resistant cases, the blackmailers would bring their victims right into night court in lower Manhattan, with one of the bulls sitting the victim down in the back of the courtroom while another argued at the rail with the calendar clerk about the arraignment schedule or a mutual friend “On the Job.”

In at least one case, the phony cops bluffed a sleepy desk sergeant into putting a victim into a holding cell overnight when the bogus detectives, who said they were from another precinct, told the sergeant they had another call to handle.

After the victim broke, everyone would return to the hotel to wait until the banks opened. As the victim squirmed or sat in shock, the bulls might blithely pass the time playing cards. At 9 a.m., they would be standing in line with the mark, in case the teller asked any suspicious questions or the victim signaled for help. Often the sums were so large, the teller would have to bring a supervisor over for authorization, heightening the tension. Sometimes they took everything the victim had. They wiped people out.

SCENARIO 2

In this scenario the chicken would simply rob the mark in the hotel room, making off with his wallet. The hustler would keep any cash, but his handlers would then use the victim’s driver’s license, credit cards, or employment ID to run a background check, often with the assistance of the crooked cops in police intelligence or clerical units on their payroll. This was how they determined who they had entrapped and whether they were worth targeting. They were looking for people who really had something to lose, people who were vulnerable and had the resources to pay them what they wanted.

Full story at https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/07/the-chickens-and-the-bulls-the-rise-and-incredible-fall-of-a-vicious-extortion-ring-that-preyed-on-prominent-gay-men-in-the-1960s.html

Hotel Astor in the 1910s…

23 NOVEMBER PLAY LIST