In 1977, the New York City Fire Department recorded 129,619 fires. Most didn’t make the newspapers. This one did. It left 9 dead, as well as 12 injured, including 2 firemen. But it wasn’t the inferno that kept this story in the papers for days so much as the building itself. The three-story Romanesque edifice was home to the city’s oldest continuously operating gay bathhouse, a haven for gay men at a time of rampant prejudice.
June’s designation as Pride Month honors the June 1969 Stonewall Uprising, when patrons of the Stonewall Inn, a popular gay bar in New York City’s West Village, fought back against a police raid. There can be no minimizing Stonewall: The protests gave rise to the LGTBQ civil rights movement. But Stonewall can also overshadow other events that bear remembering this month. The Everard fire is among them.
“Every social movement in American history has a body count,” wrote Robert W. Fieseler in Tinderbox: The Untold Story of the Up Stairs Lounge Fire and the Rise of Gay Liberation, his 2018 book about the 1973 fire at a New Orleans gay bar that killed 32. “It is routinely through death that we reckon with violations of our basic liberties.”
The Everard didn’t start out as a gay establishment. The building opened as a church in 1860 and was used as a music and exhibition hall before beer baron James Everard converted the premises into a Turkish bath in 1888. At the time, no laws required bathtubs in New York City housing, so public bathhouses were a common destination for washing and socializing. Some, like the Everard, were surprisingly opulent. An 1892 advertisement depicted mosaic floors and wainscoting of Italian marble. Spigots shaped like dolphin heads spewed water into the pool. Above the front doors, a transom of stained glass bore an “E.B.” monogram in intertwined script.
As public bathing fell out of fashion in the early 20th century, the Everard started attracting a new audience: gay men, who frequented the bathhouse as early as World War I. By the 1930s, the Everard had become a sanctuary for gay New Yorkers—one that earned the venue the moniker “Ever-hard.” In the ensuing decades, prominent visitors included Truman Capote, Rudolf Nureyev and Gore Vidal, who in 1950 wrote a paperback novel under the pen name Katherine Everard. Insiders got the joke.