The Stork Club was “New York’s New Yorkiest place,” famed gossip columnist Walter Winchell once wrote. Established in 1929 and located at 3 East Fifty-Third Street for most of its existence, the bar was a revolving door of mid-twentieth-century icons: Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, J. Edgar Hoover, and the Kennedys were all regulars. Writers like Winchell treated the club as a gossip bazaar, making it better known for its glitzy clientele than its drinks, although Johnny Brooks and then Nathaniel “Cookie” Cook, the head bartenders, were highly regarded and the bar helped to popularize a number of drinks, including the Bloody Mary, the Blinker, the Salty Dog, and even the Vodka Martini. (The bar and its drinks were lovingly memorialized by New York Herald Tribune columnist Lucius Beebe when he penned The Stork Club Bar Book in 1946.)
Owner Sherman Billingsley carefully orchestrated the Stork Club’s unique atmosphere, deftly steering customers—celebrities and civilians alike—into a complex hierarchy of seating arrangements one could interpret as favors, punishments, or tactics to generate drama for the columns. “Celebrities were the sugar that Billingsley used to swat the fly,” recalled the writer John Lahr, who visited the club in his youth. Billingsley himself put it more simply, telling the New York Times in 1945, “The out-of-towners come to see the natives who come to see each other.”
In 1951, the club’s reputation was blemished when the singer Josephine Baker claimed she had been refused service. “The Stork discriminates against everybody,” Winchell offered in defense. “It’s a snob joint.” The crowds shrank after that. By 1963 the club, which had never needed to advertise, began promoting a $1.99 hamburger-and-fries deal. That’s when the old-timers probably knew it was over. Add in a spate of union troubles—Billingsley was famously tight with a dollar—and two years later it was shuttered. When the building was demolished, a still was found in a secret basement room that showed signs of having been used far more recently than Repeal. That’s one way to keep liquor costs down.
Beebe, Lucius. The Stork Club Bar Book. New York: Rinehart, 1946.
Blumenthal, Ralph. Stork Club: America’s Most Famous Nightspot and the Lost World of Cafe Society. New York: Little, Brown, 2000.
Lahr, John. “Hog Heaven.” New Yorker, May 8, 2000, 118.
“Stork Club Is Picketed: Negro Group Assails Refusal to Serve Josephine Baker.” New York Times, October 23, 1951.
By: Reid Mitenbuler