Webster Hall and Annex

History and architecture

One of New York City’s most historically and culturally significant large nineteenth-century assembly halls, Webster Hall was constructed for Charles Goldstein in 1886-87, with an eastern Annex in 1892, to the designs of architect Charles Rentz, Jr.

The Queen Anne style original structure and Renaissance Revival style Annex are clad in red Philadelphia pressed brick with brownstone trim, and effusively ornamented with unglazed red terra cotta, that on the original building was likely produced by the Boston Terra Cotta Co. or Perth Amboy Terra Cotta Co., the leading manufacturers of the day.

The building is terminated by a c. 1911 bracketed pressed metal cornice, and had an elaborate, high dormered mansard roof until it was destroyed by fire in 1930. Though little known, the highly prolific Rentz (18551906) practiced in New York from around 1880 to his death, and was commissioned largely for flats and tenement buildings.

Throughout its history as one of Greenwich Village/East Village’s leading public rental halls and social centers, Webster Hall has been the venue for countless balls, dances, receptions, lectures, meetings, conventions, political and union rallies, military functions, concerts, performances, festivities, and sporting and fundraising events, particularly for the working-class and immigrant populations of the Lower East Side. In the 1910s and 20s, it became famous for its masquerade balls, following the success of a 1913 fund-raiser for the socialist magazine The Masses, first attracting the Village’s bohemian population, which nicknamed it the “Devil’s Playhouse.” The hall was significant as a gathering place for the city’s early twentieth-century lesbian and gay community, who felt welcome to attend the balls in drag, and then sponsored their own events by the 1920s.

Among the many notables who attended events here at this time were artists Charles Demuth, Marcel Duchamp, and Man Ray, as well as writers Djuna Barnes and Scott Fitzgerald. A favorite venue for progressive, leftist, and union political organizations, the hall was attended by such luminaries as Samuel Gompers, Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, and Dorothy Day, and was the site of the formation of the Progressive Labor Party in 1887, and the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America in 1914.

From 1953 to 1968, RCA Victor Records operated a notable sound recording studio here, which was famed for its acoustics. Pop vocal, jazz, Latin, folk, and gospel phonograph albums were recorded here by such disparate musical icons as Louis Armstrong, Harry Belafonte, Perry Como, Coleman Hawkins, Lena Horne, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Stan Getz, Sergio Franchi, and Joe Williams. The hall was noted as a venue for Broadway cast recordings, which included Julie Andrews in The Boy Friend, Mary Martin in Peter Pan, Barbara Cook in Show Boat, Ethel Merman in Annie Get Your Gun, Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, and Liza Minnelli in Flora, the Red Menace, as well as those of classical artists such as Artur Rubinstein, Marian Anderson, and Beverly Sills in Giulio Cesare.

In the 1970s-80s, the building housed Casa Galicia, a meeting and event space, and the rock club The Ritz. It was also the location for a number of movie scenes, such as “Raging Bull” (1980). The name Webster Hall was returned in 1990 with the current club.