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But my partner and I wanted to move in together, and couldn’t find anything affordable in the Village. To me, Chelsea seemed too far away from the Village, at the time the real center of gay life, especially for young men. Until 1975, I had been living on Bleecker Street between Charles and Perry in the West Village, and was reluctant to consider anything north of 14 th Street. That mini-circuit preceded the Flamingo/Fire Island Pines circuit and today’s scene. Saturday nights found many gay men traipsing between the Everard Baths and Tenth Floor, just a few doors away. But before there was Flamingo, Twelve West or The Loft and long before Studio 54 or the Saint, Tenth Floor was the first private dance club for the gay crowd that summered in the Pines. By today’s standards, the Tenth Floor had a postage stamp sized dance floor. The first of the glamorous private gay discos was Tenth Floor on West 28 th St. More than two decades before the Westside Club, Chelsea was home to some notorious sex emporiums including the wonderfully sleazy Everard Baths and that infamous cock sucking palace, The Glory Hole. The most notable were The Eagle, The Spike, The Ramp (on West Street), and even the first gay dance bar, the short lived Seventeenth Street Saloon on the site of what is now Blockbuster Video.
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There were bars for gay men in Chelsea long before Splash, Barracuda, Rome and G. Though not as crowded with lesbians and gay men as today, by the time I moved to Chelsea in 1975, it already had a noticeable gay presence. Before the current gay boom north of 14 th Street made Chelsea a gay neighborhood in it’s own right, Chelsea had been a kind of bedroom community for those who could not find affordable housing just south in Greenwich Village. As gay men moved into Chelsea in increasing numbers in the mid-1970s, they opened shops along Eighth Avenue and were pivotal in helping Chelsea become the vibrant and exciting neighborhood it is today. The queer history of the lower westside of Manhattan prior to the current gay renaissance shows the way in which activism blazed a path for a true community. Such demographics made Chelsea similar to San Francisco’s Castro before the gay influx there also enlivened a work-a-day neighborhood. Through the early 1970s, Chelsea was a drab and gritty working-class neighborhood, populated by a combination of Irish, often the descendants of longshoremen who worked the Chelsea docks, Latinos, a sprinkling of upper-middle-class, and some pockets of gay men. You may have to select a menu option or click a button.For recent immigrants to the gay Mecca of Chelsea it might seem that the neighborhood only turned queer in the 1980s.
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