Tammany Hall's Back Room

By 1880, the political machine had the house. Tammany Hall kept its headquarters up at Union Square: loud, public, and unmissable. What it wanted downtown was somewhere discreet, and 15 Vandam Street was far enough west to qualify. The Democratic Party bought the building as its social quarters, and in 1900 it was formally christened the Huron Club: Tammany's First District headquarters, and something closer to a full-service operation.

House lore is that regulars called the arrangement one-stop shopping: a bar in the cellar, a meeting hall on the main floor where the votes were counted, and rooms upstairs where they were bought. Infamous and scandalous politicians like “Battery Dan” Finn and future mayor Jimmy Walker were residents before City Hall; and Beau James “the night mayor” with his preference for jazz clubs and chorus girls. When Prohibition arrived, the bar downstairs simply stopped advertising.

Meanwhile a few blocks away in 1921, Elisabeth Irwin, a radical education activist and an out lesbian at a time when that cost something, founded the Little Red School House, among the first progressive schools in the city. It is still open. This neighborhood has always run two currents at once: the fixers upstairs and the reformers down the street. Both would eventually leave their mark on the SoHo Playhouse stage.