Gay club staten island
Beach Haven Bar
History
Located on Father Capodanno Boulevard (formerly Seaside Boulevard), across from Midland Beach, the Beach Haven opened around 1963 as a restaurant, specializing in “homemade Italian dinners” and seafood. By 1971, it was primarily a tavern with a mixed gay and straight clientele. Eventually it became Staten Island’s only lesbian bar, operating at a time when there were several gay men’s bars on the island, notably the Mayfair in St. George. By 1977, the Beach Haven was so identified with women’s softball that the June issue of the Lesbian Feminist indicated that the bar was the “contact for softball teams on Staten Island.”
In 1982, the Beach Haven became the first official meeting place for Lambda Associates, the main LGBT group on Staten Island in the 1980s and 1990s. The group, “a joint try of both men and women,” according to Lambda’s first president, Robert C. Perez, had formed in 1981 with a few people meeting in each other’s homes. After their first dance in January 1982 attracted over 400 participants, they decided to structure more formally and began meeting monthly at the Beach Haven. There, in the words of founder
Mayfair Bar & Grill
History
By the mid-20th century, this corner building across the street from Staten Island Borough Hall was the location of a popular restaurant, recognizable variously as the Mayfair Bar & Grill, the Mayfair Restaurant & Prevent, or the Mayfair Tavern.
Based on an FBI announce, the Mayfair catered to a gay crowd by the late 1950s. A 1969 guidebook created by the Mattachine Society described the restaurant as attracting a “sweater crowd” (a white-collar crowd). It also reveals that the Mayfair was “mixed” (meaning that both gay and straight people came here), though the space turned into a gay bar in the evening. During the afternoon, it catered to people who worked in the area. According to James Hanlon, a Staten Island resident who went to the Mayfair as a college student in the early 1970s, lesbians did not typically patronize this bar and instead went to the Beach Haven in Midland Beach.
The Mayfair continued to draw gay patrons through at least the late 1970s, according to a listing in the 1978-1979 Guild Guide. Since that time, the building has been extensively altered.
A nearby municipal parking lot (no longer there) opposite
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