by Marc Stein. Copyright © Marc Stein 2026. All rights reserved.

Introduction

By the time I interviewed Mel Heifetz in 1993, he was a well-known Philadelphia real estate developer, owner of multiple businesses and properties, and a local philanthropist. I was interested in him primarily because of his role in the 1959 Philadelphia coffeehouse raids.

Heifetz supplied the following biographical information before and after the taped interview:

Date of Birth: November 4, 1935

Place of Birth: Philadelphia

Place of Mother's Birth: Philadelphia

Mother's Occupation: Hairdresser

Place of Father's Birth: Russia

Father's Occupation: Mechanic, hairdresser, and businessman

Race/Ethnicity: Jewish

Religious Background: Jewish

Class Background: Working Class

Residential History

1935-40: 519 Spruce St., Center City, Philadelphia

1940-46: 7th and Wharton Streeets, South Philadelphia, Philadelphia

1946-48: 2347 S.W. 18th Street, Miami, FL

1948: 543 E. Thompson St., Fishtown, Philadelphia

1949-55: 736 Snyder Sve., South Philadelphia, Philadelphia

1955-57: Georgia, Texas, Europe (U.S. Army)

1957-58: 519 Spruce St., Center City, Philadelphia

1958-61: 24th and Sansom Streets, Center City, Philadelphia

1961-63: 1830 Arch Street, Philadelphia

1963-67: 204 S. Schell St., Philadelphia

1967-72: 1418 Conlyn St., North Philadelphia, Philadelphia

1972-82: 635 Pine St., Center City, Philadelphia

Work History

1953: Stockboy and counter sales (women's hosery)

1954: Sales (hardware)

1955-57: Radar operator, driver, weather tech (U.S. Army)

1959-61: Coffeeshop owner

1961-64: Rooming house manager/operator

1965-70: Real estate salesman

1970-76: Real estate manager 

Interview Transcript

Marc Stein Interview with Mel Heifetz, August 27, 1993. Transcribed by Abby Schrader and Marc Stein.

 

MS: This is Marc Stein and I'm interviewing Mel Heifetz at his office in Center City on August 27th, 1993. And I just thought I would start just by asking you just a general question about your family background, when you were born, where you grew up, some material about that.

 

MH: Well I was born in 1935, and although I was there, I don't remember much about it. Lived with my parents. And my father at the time was struggling to earn a living. And we lived in a couple of different areas of Philadelphia but I was generally born at 519 Spruce Street. That was a Center City location. It was a rather Jewish ethnic area and we were living in a house that was owned by my grandfather and he was present. And my grandmother was present. And we lived there to start with, but then we lived in a few other places through the city. My earliest recollections--well you really are not interested in my recollections of growing up as a child. You're interested in coming forward to what point?

 

MS: Well I guess whenever you think it began to dawn on you that you might be different or gay or whatever.

 

MH: Well my first gay experiences really started when I was about fifteen or sixteen and I was living in South Philadelphia. And I was involved in the Boy Scouts and I had a number of young friends who were with me in the Scouts that were either my age or they were within a year or two of my age. And that was probably my first experiences. But I really didn't know or understand what it was all about. And I didn't know that there was a gay society and there are gay people and there was a gay lifestyle. And even in coming out, I was fascinated with movies. I loved movies as a kid and I used to go to the movies. And quite often in the neighborhood, once you saw the movies, they would be there for certainly a couple of weeks, so you had to go further. And I would come into Center City. And probably the first experiences I've ever had with gay life, in terms of meeting gay people, was coming into the movies. And you would find gay people in the movies, because it was a very common hangout where they would try to pick up people and they would try to pick up boys.

 

MS: Did that happen to you when you were a teenager?

 

MH: Yeah, when I was a teenager. I was perhaps sixteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. And you'd come into a movie. There might be a double feature. In Philadelphia, along Market Street, we used to have three movies that used to play double features. They used to be inexpensive to go to; maybe they were a dollar to go into. They would have two features. And it was a place that you could very easily go in and spend four hours of time and enjoy it. And in the summertime they would be air-conditioned, be comfortable. And you'd quite often used to find gay people in these places. And you'd be sitting and watching a movie and someone would sit down next to you and all of a sudden you’d realize that they were rubbing your knee or doing some kind of physical contact.

 

MS: Is that what happened to you at that time?

 

MH: Yeah, yeah, and I don't ever remember meeting one of these people in terms of talking with them or socializing with them, but I remember being solicited, and to the point that you would perhaps get up and move to another location.

 

MS: So that's what you did when that happened?

 

MH: Yeah, and at the same time, or in that same area, I was perhaps for the first time in my life involved in some type of sexual activity that was homosexual activity with somebody maybe that I was growing up with, with teenagers who were my own age. But I didn't react to what was happening in the movies and I didn't understand it. I really didn't realize that this was perhaps an outgrowth of what I was doing as a teenager with other friends.

 

MS: So you never talked about it with your other friends in the Scouts?

 

MH: No, no, I never had the experience of being guided or being led, shall we say, in terms of this is gay life and a lot of people are in it. I never knew that.

 

MS: Did anybody ever discover you with your friends?

 

MH: No.

 

MS: Nothing like that ever happened. Where would you go?

 

MH: Well, I was also seeing a girl at the time. And I was also trying to pursue a relationship with a girl at the time, which is what you were supposed to do in high school and what you were supposed to do. But the sex was easier had from your boyfriends than it was from your girlfriend in those days. And there would be one or two guys that you might know, that you were friendly with, who might have suspected that you were gay and who also had some feelings. And they would be very aggressive with you, whether you wanted to or not. Maybe the first couple of occasions it was right there, and it wasn't forced on you, but you used to play these teenage games, and perhaps it was forced on you, or you like to think it was forced on you, and you enjoyed it, and another occasion and another occasion, and that was probably my introduction to gay life.

 

MS: So it was the other people who were more the initiators, it sounds like, when you were a teenager?

 

MH: A couple of them, yes, and they turned out to be straight. And they turned out to be married people who've never spoken with me since then. Because maybe I represent, as a gay person now, what they don't want to be reminded of when they were young.

 

MH: Uhhuh. But were you ever teased in any sort of way through high school?

 

MH: No.

 

MS: Anything like that?

 

MH: I was never. I was never effeminate and I was never visibly gay. I have never been in my life.

 

MS: Were there boys in high school you remember who were and who were teased?

 

MH: I'm sure there were but I don't ever remember it. I never did it. I would never be part of that. And I was always kind of the sympathetic one who would be more understanding and more supportive of them. But I don't ever remember being called a faggot or being called a homosexual or anything in my life.

 

MS: Did your girlfriend know anything about what was going on?

 

MH: I don't think that she did. At fifteen, I didn't have a girlfriend. But by the time I was sixteen and seventeen, I did. Her father happened to have been the scoutmaster of the troop. And no, I take that back. Her father was not the scoutmaster. Her father was involved with the Scouts, but he wasn't the scoutmaster. She had a younger brother and her younger brother was one of the kids in the troop. He was one of the younger boys and nothing there. But she may have heard at some point that I may have been gay. She may have heard that at some point. We broke up, but not for that reason. We broke up because at a later point in my life she wanted to get married and I wasn't quite ready. I was going into the military and I was about eighteen years old. And I wanted to stay boyfriend-girlfriend while I was in the military and she wanted me to marry her before I went into the military. And I just wasn't prepared. In fact I'm still not prepared to accept the responsibilities of married life. So that never happened.

 

MS: So you went into the military in 1953, when you were eighteen, something around there?

 

MH: I'm just a little bit unclear.

 

MS: Well was the Korean War still happening?

 

MH: The Korean War had just ended, and I think I went into the service in '55, and I think I got out in '57. I was in for two years.

 

MS: So as for the couple of years before you were in the service, did anything else happen other than the movies that you went to, the Scout stories. Anything else happen?

 

MH: Well I really had no contact with the gay community. The only contact I had was perhaps going into Center City and the movies. I had the little experiences that you have as a teenager with friends. I didn't have anybody discover me or I didn't have any revelations. I was not in any way censored for anything I had done. Everything was fine. I was in the military for two years, and in the military I was with a couple. I was fortunate in the military. I got acknowledged as having a fairly good IQ and because of that, and because of the people I was stationed with in the military, I was always offered assignments that were unusual. And I was always taken out of the ranks, as it were, and I was always elevated to much better positions. And I was always housing with people who were also in that category, so even though I didn't have the educational background at that point, I was always with people who had far better education. I suspect today that some of them were gay, although they never made an approach to me. In the military I didn't have any gay experiences for the two years that I was in the service. But I was aware of having some feelings. But in the military environment, there was just no place to really express yourself and you were always afraid that you would be discovered.

 

MS: Did you have heterosexual experiences during those years?

 

MH: No. I remember being with one or two girls when I was on leave and I was with other fellows I was stationed with. But I don't ever remember having sex with them. I don't remember being sexually active in the military. And we were in places where there were whorehouses and I was on the Raper Bond in Hamburg and I was in Copenhagen. I was in a number of places and I have some pictures with me, with other people I was stationed with. I do remember, though, when I was stationed--I was in Germany for a good bit of the time--and I was up near Kiel, which is on the Baltic in the North. And I remember that I was friendly with five or six young German boys that were all sixteen, seventeen years of age. And I was perhaps eighteen or nineteen at the time. And I remember I had a car, and we were good friends, and I remember that we used to pal around together. And I know that I, at the time, had all these desires about these young people. And it was really perhaps a carryover of being a teenager in Philadelphia, and being involved with the Scouts, and having had experiences there. And I have pictures and memories of running around with them on my time off. And we were good friends. But I don't remember ever having sex with them. I look back on it now and wonder why. I just don't think I was the one to initiate it. They were part of a boarding school, and they were all in a boarding school, and there was probably rampant activity there. But I just think that I was a little shy and inhibited and I didn't know how to get into that.

 

MS: So you got back to Philadelphia, then, sometime in the mid to late fifties?

 

MH: Yes.

 

MS: And moved back in with your family?

 

MH: Yeah, I moved back in with them because I really, at that point, had never lived on my own. I didn't have any belongings of my own, I wasn't ready. So I moved back into my grandfather's house, which was on Spruce Street, 519 Spruce Street, where we had lived as children. My grandfather had died at that point and the house was available, so I moved in there. I remember living in there for a time with my parents living in the house as well. I remember having my first gay romance, my first gay relationship, and I remember using one of the bedrooms in there, on an every night basis, with this boy, this young man named Tommy McGloughlin. He has since died of AIDS. But perhaps I was about twenty and he was probably about eighteen or nineteen.

 

MS: How did you meet him?

 

MH: I met him through the coffeeshop that I wound up owning and acquiring. And he grew up on the Main Line. He was very well-spoken. He was intelligent. He came from an Irish Catholic background. And we just found some common ground to enjoy each other's company. He was one of the first gay people that was openly gay and out that I had ever met, although I was meeting people at that time and I was just starting to come out and I was around twenty years of age. And he and I kept company. And we would go to parties and do things and see each other on an everyday basis. And he would sleep over with me.

 

MS: Were your parents in the house?

 

MH: My parents were in the house. And I was trying to be discreet, but I look back on it now with humor, because they were in the bedroom right next to us and there was a connecting door between the two rooms. And I'm sure they must have been aware from the very first what was going on. But my parents have never come down on me about it. They've been supportive of me and my lifestyle always.

 

MS: How long were you with Tommy?

 

MH: Tommy and I were lovers probably for a short period of time, maybe only a matter of months. But we were friends for many, many years after that. I only knew the people that I loved and people I was close with I wanted to stay close with in my life and I tried to do it. And Tommy and I were friends up until the time of his death a few years ago. He was in his forties when he died, so a twenty, twenty-five-year relationship.

 

MS: Maybe now's the point to start talking about the coffeehouse, because you just mentioned it, and it was around this time, I guess, that you bought the Humoresque.

 

MH: Yeah, when I came out of the Army, I was with a couple of friends that were high school chums that were straight. And when I got out of the Army, I contacted them. And they told me of where their life and everything was. But this was a time of the beatniks in New York and the beat generation. It was a time of poetry reading. It was a time of a big change in music. Elvis Presley was on the scene at the time, in the fifties, the late fifties. And I really didn't identify with that type of music. My mother was musical; she played piano. I had a taste for the Broadway stage and for theater. The first show I ever went to see, I was probably about fifteen or sixteen, I went to see Oklahoma. I didn't realize that it was the beginning of an era of musicals that had never been before. I thought there were always musicals like that, and that was only one, and I just sort of opened up the book and that was the page I stepped into. It wasn't until years later that I realized that it was the beginning of an era and that the first show I saw was the first play of that type. So for me, the music of choice was Broadway and the musicals. And Philadelphia was very rich. We had three or four theaters that had live music coming in. We watched stage shows coming in from New York. And it wasn't expensive. And if you worked or had any income, you could easily afford a ticket. It was probably less than ten dollars to go to the theater and get a decent seat. And my early days in Philadelphia were totally intermigled with going to the various theaters. The Schubert, the Forrest, or the Locust: those were the three that stand out. They always had good offerings. But I found myself, when I was about twenty years of age and just coming back out of the service, wanting to go back to school. I had dropped out of high school because of the pressures that I was under and I just didn't complete high school. I found difficulty in the last couple of years of high school and I dropped out. And I came back to Philadelphia wanting to complete that. I remember, when I came out of the military, I tried to get unemployment. I was told that it was readily available to people coming out of the military who didn't have a job. And I remember going in and trying to get it. It was the first time I went to the government to ask for something. And they told me I wasn't eligible. That was the only time I've ever gone to the government to ask for anything. But I wasn't eligible and I couldn't understand it. But I wound up going to Temple. I went to Lincoln Prep on 22nd and Locust, enrolled there, and found that it was little more than a correspondence type school. And they really didn't teach you. So I went to Temple University and found out they had a high school there. I enrolled in their high school and felt very comfortable about going onto the Temple campus of the university.

 

MS: Can I just step back for a second: what was the trouble about high school? Was it related to homosexuality?

 

MH: No, it wasn't. It was that I really had good years in junior high; I had marvelous years. When I went to high school, I was going to Southern. And Southern was a rather mixed school and I really did not acquire good study habits as I went through high school. And the subjects I excelled in were things that I liked. And there were some things I didn't. I loved physics, I loved chemistry and biology, but some things became difficult. And I was very well-distracted. I was fascinated with movies and the theater and I was finding myself cutting and I was finding myself wanting to work. I started to work when I was sixteen or seventeen. I found it was easy to make money. And I just found myself not being interested in the school enough and being very bored with the whole atmosphere. I got into some trouble and some mischief as a teenager that fell over into the high school.

 

MS: What kind of mischief? Do you want to describe it?

 

MH: No.

 

MS: You'd rather not.

 

MH: I've got into mischief over most of my life. I've always been aggressive and I was fascinated with chemistry lab and I loved fire. I loved things that went bang. And I started to take some chemicals out of the lab. And only as a folly of youth, I took more than I should have. They were in my locker--I didn't do anything with them, but they were in my locker, which was near the chemistry lab. And they went and searched lockers one day and found chemicals in there that belonged to me. They weren't drugs; they were chemicals that would go bang in the night. And I got into serious trouble for having them in my locker and for having taken them.

 

MS: Did they expel you?

 

MH: They suspended me, which eventually led to my being embarrassed by the whole thing and then dropping out of school.

 

MS: But then I guess after the military, you were saying, you went to Temple's high school and graduated.

 

MH: I went to Temple and I have a degree from Temple University. But if you look at it very carefully, you will see that it says Temple High School. But it's a regular university degree, that's what they used. And then I took some courses in real estate, because at the time, I was twenty and I was interested in real estate. But at the same time I was looking to make a living, to work, and do something. And I came across a coffee shop that had been opened in Center City--it was called Humoresque. It had only been open for a few weeks or a couple of months and it wasn't doing very much business. And the person that owned it, that opened it, his name was Howard Spigel, Spigel, S-P-I-G-E-L, something like that. And he was a young fellow, a little older than I was. He wasn't apparently very adept at business. I didn't have a great background but I made a deal to buy it from him. And I think I bought it from him for about $1500. And I didn't have $1500. I had a few hundred dollars and I agreed to pay him out. And I bought it and took it over and within a matter of weeks, the place was jumping; it was jammed. But jumping and jammed did not relate to dollars. We were open seven days a week, as I recall, and on a weekday night we might take in a gross of about twelve or thirteen dollars gross. And on a Friday or Saturday, with the place packed and people wanting to get in, we would seat about forty-five or fifty people. We might take in fifty or sixty dollars on a weekend night. I had to pay one employee--I used to do everything--but I would have to pay one employee a dollar an hour. And his name was Jerry Anderson and he was gay. And then, after Jerry, there followed another young fellow, who was also gay, and his name was Randy, and I don't remember his last name, although I still see him from time to time. And with the help of these two--over a period of a couple of years that I owned the coffee shop--we ran the coffee shop. It was simply tables and chairs. There was artwork on the walls. The artwork was usually an exhibit of somebody who would lend it to me to display it. The music was either Broadway or classical, light classical, maybe I should say popular classical. We didn't get into playing operas or playing long pieces. We stayed with more popular music that people enjoyed.

 

MS: So it wasn't really folk music or rock?

 

MH: No, folk music was really, Joan Baez was on the scene at that point. But we really were not quite; I didn't present quite the music of the time. We used to read poetry. And I remember I used to read poetry in the shop. And we focused on Ginsberg. We were focused on Ferlinghetti. We were focused on some readings of the time. We might read The Mask of the Red Death. And I had started to buy some albums that had readings by well-known celebrities, well-known actors. And I would occasionally put something on that was really dramatic, and that would be on in the background. The environment within the coffee shop was chess or checkers. And there were boards that were abundant everywhere. The only thing we served was coffee or tea. The coffees were expresso, cappuccino. There was a really small expresso machine that I remember I bought at Gimbels. It was a big purchase. It was like $200 to have this. It was really a home style expresso machine; it made steam and everything. And it wasn't like European. I mean we did a small little business. And I remember I bought that and that was the first probably big item I had ever purchased, buying a little expresso machine. But we ran the coffee shop for a while.

 

MS: Can I just cut in for a second. There is a reference in one of the newspaper articles to your having become interested in cafes because of experiencing European cafes.

 

MH: Well I had been in Europe in the military for two years. I spent a year and a half of that in Europe. I was very well travelled in Europe. One of the jobs that I had: I used to do weather forecasting for the Army. And I was stationed on an Air Force base that was a command base for the Air Force in Europe and we had flights everywhere in Europe. These were courier flights. Since I was based in the control tower, it was really easy to get on a flight, courier flight, and go everywhere in Europe. So every weekend I might go into Berlin. I could go into Rome. I could fly to London. I could go into Paris. I could go up to Copenhagen. And I've been to all those places. But I was there at a time when I was eighteen or nineteen years old. I wasn't very mature. I had some money, but limited.

 

MS: And the cafes were the places you....

 

MH: And I saw cafes and I probably saw thousands of gay people, but didn't know it. And I was probably by so much of the gay culture of Europe but I wasn't aware of it, because I really wasn't out. One of the things I got involved with in Europe, in the military, was Boy Scouts. And I was in charge of the largest American scout troop outside of the United States. The children were all American children. They were dependent children. Many of them were the officers' children or the generals' children. And for a good time that I was in Europe, that's what I did.

 

MS: I see.

 

MH: And I had quite a bit of privilege with that. And quite a bit of freedom. But that doesn't relate to gay life. It relates to a good time in the military, which not many people can talk of.

 

MS: So I guess back to the coffee shop. There were a few others that are mentioned in the newspapers: the Gilded Cage, the Proscenium.

 

MH: The Gilded Cage. Yeah, it was run by a guy named Halpern and his wife, and that was on 20th Street. No, that was on 21st Street.

 

MS: Did it have the same kind of atmosphere as yours?

 

MH: It did, but it didn't. It did and it didn't. There were three different coffee shops: the Artist's Hut, the Gilded Cage, and the Humoresque. And the Gilded Cage played to an older, more settled group of people. They didn't have a younger crowd. They had a lot of married couples or maybe older dating couples that were in town. They had a lot of people who lived in the neighborhood. The Artist's Hut was more trendy and they would have people coming by from the neighborhoods. If anything, we had a younger crowd coming into the Humoresque. I think all of the coffee shops had some gay people coming into them. We had younger gay people who were under twenty-one, who were not old enough to be in the bars. But what we also had at the time--the most popular hangout for gay people in Center City was Rittenhouse Square. And Rittenhouse Square was almost an institution. There wasn't anybody who was gay who didn't know of or who didn't go in and spend time in Rittenhouse Square. And at any hour of the day or night, there would be something going on in there that involved a lot of gay people. And in the evening it was the hangout for people who were not prone to be in bars. And the bars were not as they are today. You couldn't dance in the bars and you couldn't socialize, as we do today in the bars, and you couldn't touch people and be physical. They were very uptight about their licenses. They were very regulated. They had to pay off. It was a very sinister type thing to have a bar in those days.

 

MS: But could you be more open and expressive in the outdoor atmosphere of Rittenhouse Square?

 

MH: You really could be because the park guard that was in charge there was a very kindly older gentleman with grey hair, quite probably was gay. And I'm trying to recall his name and I can't. But his name was known to everybody in the park. He would never come down on anybody that was gay about anything, and he would be protective. So that if a bunch of neighborhood kids came through--there is a great word that comes to me that you have never heard, that no one will ever tell you. But the word of the day, when you referred to somebody who was really like neighborhood and really like bad or nasty, the word was neshenu.

 

MS: I have heard that word, somebody else I've interviewed….

 

MH: And the word neshenu is a part of a dialogue which used to exist years ago here in Philadelphia for gay people, but if you saw somebody on the street, and you thought that they might get nasty, right away would be the word neshenu. And no one ever knew what it meant except gay people, but it meant we better be cool; this guy is bad.

 

MS: How would you spell neshenu?

 

MH: I don't begin to know. But I have shared that word with a number of people over the years and no one has ever heard of it.

 

MS: I only know it from someone else I interviewed.

 

MH: But to be in the area, to come into town back in those days, you could very well meet someone in Rittenhouse Square. And you could meet in the center of the square. There was a fountain and there was a little pond area. But you could go in there and you would sit on the wall adjacent to the center area and you would have fifteen or twenty friends near you. Their jokes, the stories, the remarks about people walking through. Something cute would walk through and everybody would light up. You would constantly do a run around the track. The racetrack was the outer rim that had all the benches on it. And there would always be some young queens that would be very aggressive and want to be seen or they would want to pick up somebody. And they would be doing a once around the race track and you would walk with them. And they'd constantly be coming back and saying, “You come with me now” and “You come with me” and “No, no, we just did.” And so there'd constantly be a stream of people walking around. And it was marvelous because if you were not quite out, or if you were a little bit withdrawn, or you didn't know how to cruise, all you had to do was sit anywhere on a bench in this park. And within the course of an hour, you'd have twenty people coming by that would be cruising you or looking at you or sitting down next to you. In my whole life I don't think there's ever been an area that has been quite as gay friendly or as easy to get picked up. It didn't involve alcohol, didn't involve drugs, didn't involve anything except two people wanting to relate.

 

MS: I have a couple of questions about Rittenhouse Square. Some people have described to me that Rittenhouse Square had different areas that different people sort of hung out in. Some people have said the perimeter was one group and the inside was another. Or the grass was one group and the benches were another. Can you recall anything like that?

 

MH: Yeah, I would say so. I think the people who were far more out, far more openly out, would be in the center of the square. And we'd be sitting up on the wall. There was a wall there, in the center, on either side of the pond, or behind the pond, and you might have your favorite spot, which was a vantage point where you could see people walking through. And you would also have your crowds. Everything was in groups. We were all identified with the people that we were friendly with. But the ones that were fairly aggressive--and there would be drag queens that would come up there, too, maybe not in drag as we see it today, but maybe a little bit more flamboyant for the time, and they had some makeup on, but not in dresses, not in full drag. And they would gather at different places here.

 

MS: Was Rittenhouse Square a lesbian as well as a gay male gathering place?

 

MH: I don't ever remember a strong presence of women in the Square.

 

MS: And was this mostly a white crowd or was it mixed racially?

 

MH: It was mostly white, but there were some black queens that were involved and I was friends with a number of them at the time. There was perhaps a group of black queens who were from whatever neighborhoods they were a part of. They came into Center City and they very much enjoyed the…. [interruption]

 

MS: You were saying that there was a group of black drag queens that were in the Square and that there weren't too many racial tensions as well as you could see.

 

MH: Yeah, there really never was. I was friends with, I grew up in South Philadelphia, so blacks were part of our culture down there and I was always friends with them, and I had Chinese friends. And the black queens were a lot of fun, because they were really well outspoken and if there was drag around, it was quite often they that were doing it, and they would be funny. And there really was no problem in those days. You really felt as though you were on safe ground when you were in Rittenhouse Square. Occasionally, maybe during political periods, when elections were coming up, they would start having sweeps of the park and they would chase you out, or the guard that was so friendly would tell us that we would have to be cool and we would have to get out of there by nine o'clock tonight, or somebody had complained. But there could be two or three hundred gay people in that park on any given night. And I couldn't begin to convey to you what a nice feeling and mood it was to be in an area that really was like being in Provincetown and walking down the street there where everyone is gay and hand in hand and you feel as though there is no one to oppress us. There is nobody.

 

MS: Right.

 

MH: That's what Rittenhouse Square was. And that was the environment.

 

MS: And would you say the Humoresque was part of the extended Rittenhouse Square?

 

MH: Well, yes, it really was. That's what I was leading into. It really was only a block, a block and a half, away. It was one of the places that a number of the gay people used to walk to. We didn't have a predominantly gay clientele in the coffee shop but we certainly were always represented. I can think of a few people who I still know today from that era, a half of dozen of us that were gay that I am still friendly with. One of the people that might be interesting for you to talk to, because he's always been a very colorful Black drag queen in Philadelphia, is called Sarah Vaughn.

 

MS: Yeah, I've heard a lot about her.

 

MH: Her real name is Barrett, Alan Barrett. Alan Barrett. And I'm going to be the only one that's gonna' you his real name. But you'll never find out his age, because he's probably older than I am and we've always joked about it.

 

MS: Someone told me he works, she works, at Woody's.

 

MH: Yeah, she's on the day crew at Woody's right now. And he's very colorful and very flamboyant and he would probably be interesting to talk to. But there are a couple of others that I also could turn you onto from the period. Of the people coming into the coffee shop, I was always engrossed in work. And even reading poetry in the shop, which I used to do, was work, and I was the only one that was there that was responsible for what was going on. And I had to deal with people behaving, and for the most part, there never was any problems of behavior as to difficulty. We might be crowded and we might have to turn people away. You could only have so many people in and there wasn't really standing. If you couldn't sit, you couldn't be in. And people would linger over forty cent pots of coffee and one dollar pastry that was all swiss pastry. And that was our whole menu. It was either coffees and teas or pastry. We didn't have anything alcoholic. I think we had apple juice. It was one of the only cold beverages. We didn't serve soda water or anything. And it was just a quiet nice place to be. There would be jokes. There would be humor. People would know one another from table to table.

 

MS: If you had to guess, what would you say was the percentage of gay to straight people in the Humoresque?

 

MH: Well, it may have been sixty percent straight to forty percent gay. Perhaps somewhere within there. If not, maybe seventy-five/twenty-five. But the people that were there were aware that there were gay people there and it didn't matter. It was part of the beat generation. It was a very accepting time. It was a very open time. It was a time of the flower children; it evolved into that. It was just a very open time.

 

MS: And what about percentage of men to women?

 

MH: I would say that it was mostly male rather than female. Probably seventy-five percent male to twenty-five percent, maybe eighty percent to twenty percent. The females would be the dates that some of the fellows would come in with. It was a place where some of the straight kids in the neighborhood who wanted to be avant garde and who wanted to go to the hip places, they would take a date on a Friday or Saturday night and come in.

 

MS: So it was not really a lesbian hangout, it sounds like.

 

MH: No. I don't remember lesbians at that point in my life. I may have been in their company, but I was not quite out yet. And I was far more fascinated with the male than the female at the time.

 

MS: And again, I know this is just rough guesses, but what would you say was the percentage of white to non-white?

 

MH: There were not a lot of blacks that would come in. There would only be two or three couples, maybe, that you would see in there, but they would be for the most part couples. And they would be the mixed couples that were in town. In that period, there was not a lot of racial crossover at the time.

 

MS: So you're talking about mixed straight couples?

 

MH: Yeah, I'm talking about straight couples. The black queens of the day used to go out with the white gay kids of the day. Black gay would go out with white gay and carry on or have an affair. That was not unusual. But it wasn't very much in the open. It was far more discreet. And it was just as discreet for straight couples. And for a black boy to go out with a white girl, there weren't many places that they would really feel comfortable. But the coffee shops, they were comfortable.

 

MS: I see.

 

MH: And then we used to have them coming in there, but not in great numbers. Just maybe one or two couples in the course of a night. And nobody thought much of it at the time. I don't remember any focus on it at the time.

 

MS: So how did the trouble with the police start? Maybe we should get into that whole episode.

 

MH: Well, it started with the police. I was never in business before and I really had never had any contact with the police prior to that. The police were nice people, and they treated you nicely, and as I was a young child, I really respected them. And in being in business there, I was always hi and hello and how are you. And at one point, they were fascinated with the fact that this was a non-alcoholic place and that it attracted a lot of young people. And there wasn't a lot of money to be made, but they never had to focus on that. They just saw a crowd in there on Friday or Saturday and it was probably far better than a lot of bars could bring in in terms of the number of people. And there was a time when it was suggested that I go over to talk to Captain Rizzo about my relations with the police. And I didn't understand why, but it was suggested by a sergeant to me. And I went over to talk to Captain Rizzo. I didn't know him, and I remember walking into a police station at the time. It was at 12th and Pine, where there are some new houses now standing. And it was a small district police station. Rizzo's name was well known. I was from South Philadelphia. Never seen him before. I had never been in the presence of a police officer before, other than a regular patrolman. And I went in to talk to him and he suggested that he had some complaints about my facility and that if I would cooperate with him, he was sure that it was no problem. And I didn't know what he meant. And as we talked, it was suggested that if I were supportive of the patrolmen on the beat that were in cars, and if I were to make a gesture towards them, they would be very supportive of me. And I wasn't quite sure what that meant. But if it meant money, I didn't understand it. And if it meant money, I didn't have any anyway.

 

MS: Do you think it meant money?

 

MH: At the time, I didn't understand it. But I spoke with him on a second occasion. On the second occasion he said that Christmas would be a nice time to show your appreciation. So being a little bit innocent, I thought, I don't know what to do. I don't have any money. So what I did was I went to the state store and they had these little small bottles of alcohol. And not the little one ounce things, but maybe like four ounces bottles. And you bought them for about a dollar fifty, a dollar sixty apiece at the time. And I bought about ten of them and I wrapped them in Christmas paper. And Christmas week, as the patrol cars would come by, and I would see them go by, I would stop them and I would give them each one of these little bottles, which was like a Christmas gesture. Apparently that wasn't quite the gesture that he had in mind. And I started having problems with the police. And their problem was that somebody would park their car on the sidewalk on the street. There was parking on one side, but it would very easily fill up on a weekend night. Somebody would park illegally on the sidewalk a couple of doors over. I don't know whose car it was. I don't even know if they were in my place of business. There was a little French restaurant next door to us. And this was a street that on the ground floor of all the businesses on Sansom Street, it had businesses. Some were open during the day; some were open at night. And above these businesses were usually apartments. So there were people living on the street at night. And I guess they were bothered if somebody had a car parked on the sidewalk. And they didn't block the street. And occasionally the police would come in and say there's a car blocking the sidewalk, or there are some people standing outside waiting to get in and we have a complaint. And as it turned out, I found out some years later, that there was a fellow living on the street who today is gay, and who lived there with his family, and they lived down at the far end of the street. And he was one of the people that was chronically calling the police. And he was just a very tightass type of person.

 

MS: I see.

 

MH: And I think that he may have been one of the people, if not the person, that precipitated the whole thing. As we got into court, he was the one that the police were able to call. And I mean my address was 2036 and his address was, I think, 2002. And they had a laundry business down there and they lived above it. And he was the one that the police were able to point to and say, “Well this fellow was bothered.” And he was a half a block away from my place. He obviously couldn't hear anything or see anything.

 

MS: Do you remember his name?

 

MH: The business name was Maidmen, Maidmen, M-A-I-D-M-E-N, and I remember him because I see him from time to time in town.

 

MS: There's a woman also who's mentioned in a lot of the articles, Gertrude Fitzpatrick maybe. Does that ring a bell?

 

MH: No. I remember the name, but I don't remember her. But these were people that perhaps wanted a residential street, and yet they lived on a commercial street. There was a bar across from us, just down, there was a bar. There was a garage building. Half the block was a garage building, right across from us, where they had pulling in and pulling out cars all night long. It was twenty four hours. So it was hardly a residential street. If you saw the garage building, it was perhaps three or four stories tall and it was the equivalent of like fifteen properties wide. It was enormous. And there were businesses. So for them to want to evoke it's a residential area in this street was absurd. And I was perhaps the one most readily focused on because I didn't have any money to hire or to take care of the powers to be. But all of a sudden, without great warning, if the police would stop by and just say, “Hey, we have a complaint, there's noise.” And I would say, “But you're in here. What noise is there? The door is closed. We have air conditioning in here.” “On the street,” I said, “I have nothing to do with what's going on on the street. Those are not my customers. That's not my area of business.” But the police really didn't need a great justification. And one day, without any more warning than that, they all of a sudden came walking in. And they said that everybody here is under arrest. And this was a public place. There was a glass window. You could just walk by and look in and see the whole store. It was only one square room. There were no places to go beyond that. And with that, everybody stood up and said, “What's going on?” There's chess, there's checkers, there's music on. And they said, “You're all under arrest.” Over the course of an hour or so they took us out. They didn't take any names. They didn't take any addresses. They didn't take any information. And they just had us all get into paddy wagons and they took us all to 12th and Pine Street. And when we got there, nobody had been told why we were there or what was going on. They were arresting us for disorderly conduct. And they put us in jail cells. And it happens that, well, I mentioned Sarah Vaughn, who was Allen Barrett. Allen Barret was with us. He got arrested. Except his brother was a policeman. So during the course of the night, he was released.

 

MS: Ahhah.

 

MH: And all of a sudden he was not part of it.

 

MS: Yes, there's a reference to him and I didn’t make the connection.

 

MH: Well, there were two or three other people who were also released because they knew somebody. And when we went to court the next morning, they had magistrates' hearings right at the police station, they had never really taken any names, except after they got us to the jail. Then they started asking your name and where do you live. They went up in front of this magistrate, and the magistrate system in those days it was very political. I mean for fifty dollars you could buy your way out of anything, if you had fifty dollars. And I didn't know it. But they went and read this description of people who were performing what they thought was disorderly conduct. And they would say that you, your name, were sitting with this girl, and this fella', and it just happens that you didn't even know this girl or this fella' and they were not who you were with. And they said that you were up on the table and you were dancing around in a very merry fashion to suggest that maybe you were gay or something. The tables were little coffee shop tables. They were little round tables. I don't know that you could have even stood on one of them. But they tried to allege strange behavior to a number of different people that were in there. And the joke was that for the forty people or so that were involved, they didn't put anybody with the same people that they were with. And with this, the magistrate at that point held me for operating a disorderly house and held me over for court. And I think most of the others were just discharged at that point.

 

MS: Did the others stay overnight?

 

MH: Yeah, we all stayed overnight.

 

MS: Everyone stayed overnight.

 

MH: We all stayed overnight.

 

MS: And did you stay more than one night?

 

MH: No. We were all out the next morning. And I at this point don't remember the circumstance of even being in a cell. I guess I was, but I don't even remember that. But the whole thing smelled so badly because of the people that had been let go, of the fact that it was my very first experience with the police and the fact that there was a lack of credibility. I mean I was a young person. I was only around twenty. And to tell me that the police would lie, the police would make up stories, the police would fabricate a whole thing that involved forty citizens? How could they do a thing like that? It shows you how naive I was at the time. And as this went forward, within a day or two, I didn't have any money for lawyers. I didn't have any money in the bank. I contacted the American Civil Liberties Union. Somebody had told me to go to them. And they were kind enough to direct me to two attorneys, Klinger and Mann. I never had experience with a lawyer in my life before. And I went to Klinger and Mann, and it turned out that they were two very well-known lawyers in Philadelphia. They took the case pro bono. They told me all I'd have to do was pay for cost. And all of a sudden I was now in the company of lawyers, for perhaps the first time in my life. And they were very knowledgeable. And they said that a lot of your rights have been abused here. And when they heard the fact that the police had falsified the whole thing, that seemed to not have been any surprise to them. And it went forward from there, with them coming forth and defending us.

 

MS: How did you get together bail to get out, cause I seemed to remember that there was like a thousand dollar bail for you?

 

MH: Well, a thousand dollar bail would have only represented, you needed ten percent at the time.

 

MS: I see.

 

MH: So you may have only needed a hundred dollars. My mother and father came forth with some money to help me. But my mother and father were not very wealthy and they were not very easy with money. They didn't give me money very willingly or very freely. But of course they weren't going to let their son. I presume it was from them. I remember needing some money to advance for the fees in dealing with the lawyers. But I borrowed some money from my mother, I think, at the time.

 

MS: So having read through a lot of the newspaper articles of the time, it seems like some people were saying this was drugs. Some people were saying this was young people violating curfew. Some people were saying this was gay people. You've suggested that there was also an element of not supporting the police at Christmas. Looking back on it, which combination of those things do you think really caused the police to come in in the first place?

 

MH: Well, I think what precipitated the whole thing was the fact that I didn't understand that there was a system of paying off the police in those days. And that if you had made an arrangement where you gave them fifty dollars a week, you would never be bothered for anything. And bars of the day all paid off. I mean as I got older and as I became familiar with the bars and the people that owned them, I found out that there was an arrangement, that they used to go and pay off money every week, either to the police or to City Hall. I mean I actually in years later wound up walking with someone who owned a bar, and went into City Hall, and I knew what he was doing. He was paying them off. And he did that every week.

 

MS: A gay bar owner?

 

MH: Yeah.

 

MS: So, if that was the reason....

 

MH: That's what precipitated it. After they precipitated it and raided us, the next day, all of a sudden, at this hearing, they had to come up with justification for doing it. So they fabricated all these things. The police expected, as did Rizzo, that this was gonna' just blow out at the magistrate's hearing. He would get some headlines out of it. He would get some credit for having broken up this disorderly conduct. They never expected that I was going to proceed with the American Civil Liberties Union or that people were going to rally around me.

 

MS: Right.

 

MH: That this was going to be picked up on the talk shows, that this was going to make the national wire services. I mean LIFE magazine was involved. Newsweek was involved. It really all of a sudden went on the wires as to be a big incident of the day. And I don't think they ever expected it. So the next thing they had to do was try to justify this raid.

 

MS: And that's when homosexuality was brought in.

 

MH: And then all of a sudden, that was probably the first time in my life that I was ever face to face with the word publicly, homosexual.

 

MS: Did anyone in any part of these proceedings accuse you of being gay? Or did that come up in any way?

 

MH: No, never came up. Never came up. I was never accused of that. I was in conversation sometime later with people who were fairly politically astute at the time. And they brought up the fact to me that you had black and white couples coming in, interracial couples coming in. And they said, “Don't you understand? That was the thing that really triggered this whole thing.” They didn't like the idea, the police, being very white and being very conservative, didn't like the idea of seeing black and white couples back in those days on the streets. I mean that was thirty years ago. And all of a sudden, seeing a facility that allowed them in to socialize in public like that, and they pointed to that.

 

MS: Do you believe that?

 

MH: Yeah. I would believe it.

 

MS: As a precipitating thing, or more as an excuse, the way you were saying about homosexuality?

 

MH: If you were paying off the cops in those days, you could literally do anything and get away with anything. But they would still harass you, because they knew they had you. It's like somebody that's being extorted.

 

MS: I see.

 

MH: If somebody's extorting money from you, for whatever reason, they not only get the money; they also get the ability to control you. And I think they felt they could, in some way, do one or the other with me. When they looked back and they said, “Geez we have to go to court, and we're gonna' have to testify,” they then started looking around and saying, “Well, what can we go after him for in court?” And I think that's when they went to a guy named Clarence Ferguson. He was very colorful, like a Damon Runyon character. He was head of the vice squad. I think that the only thing that vice applied to was him and his men. Because they were the ones that would do all the shakedowns of money of all the bars and all the people in town. And if it came to anything that was corrupt, you can be sure that Clarence Ferguson's name would be involved and the headlines that ensued. I never saw Clarence Ferguson. I never saw the vice squad. Never heard them mentioned. Never saw them in our facility, never once. And I didn't even know what drugs were at the time. And I knew everybody that came into the place. And we weren't into drugs. It was not a point of drugs in the culture. I mean drugs; it was just something. I never knew grass. There was no such thing as pills. There was nothing.

 

MS: Right.

 

MH: It was not part of the culture. It wasn't even part of the gay culture. I mean I was coming out at the time and I was with a lot of young people. God, it was marvelous days. But it wasn't part of the culture. And so when they said that drugs were behind it, really, who had drugs? Were any drugs found in the premises? No. Nothing was. Did anybody that was picked up that night have any arrest record for drugs? No. Was anybody charged with it? No. But months later, as it went into court, they brought in Clarence Ferguson and they had him testify that he was aware that people who were known to use drugs had frequented my establishment. And when he was asked, “Well, did you arrest any of them.” “No.” “Did you know that they did drug transactions there?” “Well, these were people who used drugs. Of course, if they do drugs, they would.” “Did these same people go into the Academy of Music?” “I don't know. We didn't watch the Academy of Music.” “Did they go into Horn and Hardart's?” “I don't know. We didn't watch Horn and Hardart's.” “Oh, but you watched the coffee shop and you saw them go in there.”

 

MS: Why do you think the Humoresque was singled out more than the other coffee shops?

 

MH: Because we had younger clientele. Because maybe we had gay people, where they didn't have quite--I said to you we probably had visibly more gay people coming in there than the other places.

 

MS: Did they also support the police? At Christmas-time? As far as anything you know?

 

MH: I don't know. The owner was a married couple, the Halperins, and a guy named Manny Rubin owned the Artists' Hut on Walnut Street. And I really don't know if they did or not. I never thought to go around and ask them, “What do you guys do that they don't bother you?”

 

MS: There's one article that's titled, "Three Coffee Houses Vow to Police Themselves and Bar Undesirables." And it was after the case was already in process. And it says specifically that you weren't present at this session, but that the Spillings, representing the Artists' Hut, were there, Manuel Rubin, and Ed Halpern.

 

MH: It was just for publicity. The police were trying to suggest that they had cause and reason to do what they did. And with that, they said that these coffee houses. Of course, you're talking about coffee houses. They represented the beatniks. Later, we might have said they represented the hippies. Today, we might very well characterize them by saying they represent counterculture, something counterculture. Today probably every third person would be an FBI agent in disguise or undercover to police. And that's what it was. They were just trying to cover their ass, because they had never had a reason to really raid us.

 

MS: Rizzo ended up getting transferred and promoted during the whole controversy. Did you see this as a direct result of the heat that came down when civil libertarians and other people began defending the coffeehouses?

 

MH: I've never understood Rizzo's rise to fame. I've always attributed it to political. He was politically allied with people and I think that he had the backing of shall we say the powers to be that represent South Philadelphia. I think he was very strongly supported by big money in South Philadelphia. And you can figure out where that comes from. That is not unusual. There are political people of today that have an amazing rise to fame and power in our society, right here in Philadelphia. And nothing seems to stop them and they just seem to just keep going forward and forward and forward.

 

MS: Did you see the transfer and promotion as a victory for him or a victory for you?

 

MH: I think it was the city trying to make the best of a bad situation. The city wanted to get out of it very badly and they didn't like the publicity that ensued. This went on for months and months. I mean six months, eight months, a year later, this was still publicity. I was getting letters of support from people all over the city. And they were sending in donations. It never amounted to big money, but ten dollars or fifteen dollars to help in your legal defense fund and things like that. And I was being supported. Everywhere I went, people were very supportive.

 

MS: What happened to the coffeehouse itself during this time?

 

MH: We started to attract an undesirable clientele because the people that had been coming in were now scared away because we had had two police raids. And we went and got an injunction from the city, from the federal court, that they not raid the shop again. There was nothing to raid it for to begin with. But they killed the business; they killed the business. And we started to attract undesirables. And I remember, before I got out of the coffeeshop, I had a very negative experience in there with some young neighborhood kids coming in. And there was nobody else in the shop. It was just me; it was perhaps late at night; it was perhaps a weekday night. And they were being very ugly and I was in there by myself. And they started getting nasty because there wasn't anything happening. They came to the shop for a dollar for coffee for whatever. They were just being miserable. And at one point I just said to them, “Look, I'm closing up. There's nobody else here. You guys are going to have to leave.” With that they went and stole all the stainless steel. We used to serve all the coffee in stainless steel pots and things. They cleared the whole place of everything and walked out with it. And I started yelling at them from the shop. This was a year later. This was before I got out of the coffee shop business. And I started yelling at them from across the street.

 

MS: Was this the episode with a gun?

 

MH: Yes. I started yelling at them from across the street, and they took the things that they had taken, the stainless steel pots and stuff. And I didn't make much money. It wasn't a big money thing; it never was. And it was just very bothersome to me that all of a sudden we had people that were so lowlife like this. And I started yelling at them and they started getting threatening. So I walked back in the shop and there was an unloaded gun. And I had never had any experience with guns. Don't ask me why it was there. Why was it there? I don't know; maybe I was a wild kid from my earlier years. It was an unloaded gun. There was no ammunition in the shop for it. And it was there. I guess I thought it was a means of protection. And I simply walked to the front of the shop again and I had this empty revolver in my hand. And these guys were threatening me that they were going to beat me up or do something. And I just let them see that I had a gun and that was the extent of it. Shortly thereafter the police came and they wanted to know what happened. In fact, I think I called the police to tell them I had a problem with these young people and they were outside and they were threatening. And I called the police and the police came and they paid no attention to these people. They only paid attention to me, because it's called payback. And because I was in the headlines at the time, and I had all this help, they all of a sudden charged me with violation of I think it's called the Sullivan Act, having a firearm. And I don't know if anybody even saw it, but I told them I had a gun. And they took the gun, no ammunition for it, no bullets for it, no nothing for it. But I got charged with having possession of a gun on a public thoroughfare.

 

MS: Were you found guilty? Was it tried? Did it go to court?

 

MH: Yeah. I don't even know if I had a lawyer. I don't remember. I didn't have much money.

 

MS: Did you pay a fine?

 

MH: Yeah, I had to pay a fine, exactly, and I wound up with a police record and I wound up giving them the satisfaction. But it followed me for years to come. I mean anything that would happen to me in Philadelphia has always left me realizing that I won't come out ahead in the situation. I had a lover shortly thereafter, at the time of the raids really. I had a lover that I was going with, a young man named Billy Smith. Billy has died of AIDS as well. And he was young. He was my age. And he was a bit flamboyant and he was a bit feminine. And I remember he would be driving my car and the police stopped him on a couple of occasions. And when they saw that my name was on the registration, because my name was very well-known at the time, I didn't realize it. I mean I didn't know what notoriety was. I didn't know what having a recognized name meant. But he got in trouble with the police each time they stopped him. One time, they took him into a police car. They took him down to the lakes, which is South Philadelphia. It's a park in South Philadelphia.

 

[interruption]

 

MS: You were just describing the incident with Billy Smith and the police.

 

MH: Yeah. Well Billy Smith was picked up and they saw that it was my car, my registration, and they had him park the car. And they took him in the police car and they drove him down to South Philadelphia. And he had to submit to giving them oral sex, to the two policemen, or they were going to beat him up. And they took him back to the car and let him go. And that was the end of that incident. I remember another incident involving him and the car. His mother lived in Germantown, as I recall. And he was up to see his mother, and when he left, he again got stopped by the police on another occasion. And they took him to the police station. And I remember he called me, and they wanted me to come up to the police station to claim my car. And I said, “Why?” And they said, “Because he doesn't have anything in writing authorizing him to be driving the car registered in your name. So we want you to come up here and claim your car.” I said, “But he has the owner's card.” “That doesn't give him authority to drive your car.” So I remember I had to get a ride to go up to the police station in Germantown to tell them that he had permission to drive my car so they would let him go. They didn't charge him with anything, but was just a form of harassment.

 

MS: Right.

 

MH: So I knew that if I had any experience with them, and I had other experiences with the police. I mean in living in town it was difficult to be popular or to be visible enough not to have problems with the police.

 

MS: Why do you think you lost the case in federal district court?

 

MH: Because we really didn't have enough money to really support the case and bring the witnesses that we needed. I was told on the state level that if we would go to the state superior court, we could overturn the Philadelphia verdict. But at the time, it was a long ways after the incident. The coffee shop had already diminished. I had already grown out of that aspect of my life. I wanted to move away from the coffee shop. It didn't interest me anymore. I wasn't doing the business. I didn't have the support that I had had earlier. The police were trying to defame me. I had never been involved with the police or anything prior to that. And I all of a sudden realized that I was just leaving myself in harm's way with all of this, so I just let it end. We could have taken an appeal, but appeals cost money. I remember the lawyers, Klinger and Mann, told me that I would need a thousand dollars or twelve hundred dollars just for the fees involved. In order to take an appeal, you have to get a transcript. Well if you have three or four days of court testimony and you request a transcript, it's very expensive.

 

MS: Right.

 

MH: I couldn't afford it. Not at that point in my life.

 

MS: And when did you end up giving up the coffeehouse? Or did you sell it? Do you recall what year?

 

MH: It was probably within a year, maybe a year after the raid and all that business. A year later I was out of there.

 

MS: Well is there anything else you want to tell me about the coffeehouse raids or should we maybe move on?

 

MH: I will tell you that Clark Polak was one of the customers who used to come in there regularly.

 

MS: Is that right?

 

MH: I used to meet with him and talk with him and listen to his views and opinions. And he was a nice person.

 

MS: What do you know about him? Because you then knew him before everyone else I've talked to knew him. Because he didn't really come into the movement until the early sixties.

 

MH: He used to go to school. He had books. It's interesting, because a lot of the people that came into the coffee shop in those days I've run across in business.

 

MS: What else did you know about Polak? Do you know what part of the city he came from?

 

MH: No. I used to know him based on the coffee shop and I used to see him in Rittenhouse Square. We used to see him over at Dewey's 17th Street, which is another very popular hangout for gay people, the Dewey's restaurants.

 

MS: Right. So he hung out in all those places?

 

MH: Yeah. Somebody else who was very supportive of me at the time. He was an architect and had an office down at the corner of 20th and Walnut, which was right on our block. And he is one of the most acclaimed architects of the era.

 

MS: Well several people I've interviewed have told me about going to the Humoresque.

 

MH: Well the park was named after him, right over here at 11th and Pine.

 

MS: 11^th and Pine? Oh Louis Kahn?

 

MH: Yeah, Louis Kahn. Louis Kahn was a very regular customer in the coffeeshop.

 

MS: Is that right?

 

MH: Yeah, he took me into his offices a number of times, around the corner. But he would come in there on a very regular basis and hang out. And he was very supportive, he was very nice, he was a short Jewish guy. And I just remember him very well as being very supportive and very kindly. A number of the people that were in the neighborhood, all the guys who worked across the street at this parking garage, they were all joking with me all the time. And they all would laugh about this--these were all black guys--they would all laugh about all this. And they didn't believe what was happening. It was like they couldn't. So people that were there and saw what was happening would keep saying, “What's going on? We don't understand.” In terms of gay relevant to the coffee shop, other things that were gay. I guess really there really wasn't. It really was not a gay bar of the time. It wasn't a gay facility of the time, but it was frequented by some gay people. But Sarah Vaughn, this kid Harold, which was another black kid, what a marvelous well-spoken person he is. Jerry Feinstein, who is a friend of mine today, Jerry used to come in there. Another fella' that’s down in Florida, who just opened up a gay guesthouse, Jerry Poplar, Jerry used to come in there. A decorator here in Philadelphia, Tommy Crosby. Tommy and I are still friendly. In fact we still work together even today. Tommy Crosby. I've known Tommy since he was about seventeen or eighteen years old. Well there are other people.

 

MS: What work did you move into after the coffeehouse closed?

 

MH: I wound up purchasing a rooming house business from somebody that had a rooming house on Arch Street. And I leased the building. And I operated it as a rooming house. And then I leased the building next door. And I did that for a few years. And at the same time I started to get into real estate. And real estate was the field that I went into as I was in my later twenties. My mid to late twenties, I was going into real estate. And I have been really in real estate, buying buildings and dealing with rentals and tenants, for most of my life.

 

MS: Did you initially start with primarily gay clientele?

 

MH: No.

 

MS: No.

 

MH: No, when I went into the rooming house business it was very low-income working class people with very little money. Seven, eight dollar a week rentals and I used to work like a dog. I used to clean the rooms, clean bathrooms, and do all the repairs and renovations. I did everything myself.

 

MS: So were you aware during the sixties of housing discrimination or the problems that gay people faced?

 

MH: Never, never really saw it. Never really saw it. Never really heard of it. I was never a part of it. People that I knew had apartments all over Center City. During the period that I was coming out, I was in town. The rooming house that I had was on Arch Street, around 18th, 19th, and Arch. No, 19th, 18th, about 19th and Arch. But anyway, I would constantly find myself going in and out through Suburban Station. I was constantly walking over to Rittenhouse Square all the time. I mean during the day, during the evening. I was living there for awhile. That's right. I lived there for awhile too. I forgot about that.

 

MS: O.K. Well maybe I can ask you some questions then about the gay bars in town, because I know that that's something that you might be able to help me check a good deal on. A lot of people have described to me the bars in the fifties and sixties. I know that you became a bar owner later, but I'm wondering if you know something about who owned the city's gay bars, and you were talking before about the relationship between the bar owners and the police.

 

MH: Yeah, the most popular bar was the Westbury at 15th and Spruce. It was owned by Dave Morgan. Dave Morgan retired to Florida.

 

MS: What era are we talking about for the Westbury? In the sixties?

 

MH: Yeah.

 

MS: And who was Morgan? He was a gay guy?

 

MH: No, he was a straight man. He was a straight man who was very friendly with gay people. And he's the one that I remember most in terms of owning it. It's a shame. Some of the bartenders from that period would really be far more colorful in being able to describe to you who owned and who did what.

 

MS: Right.

 

MH: They probably could also talk to you about the police and the interaction with the police. Also the LCB and the licensing difficulties. That wouldn't be me perhaps. And the question is who's still around from that era.

 

MS: Right.

 

MH: One of the really popular bartenders of the time was someone named Patti Page, who used to work at the Drury Lane and was there for a lot of years. And there was a guy named George who used to be a coat check, and he's well-known.

 

MS: Patti Page was a woman?

 

MH: No, no, Patti Page was a nickname for somebody who used to work in the bars. I am trying to think. My earliest recollections of gay bars in town were limited to the Westbury. And I can remember what it looked like and I can remember the bartender. The bartender, who would be marvelous for you, I think his name was Eddie Marcus. And Eddie Marcus was a bartender, and he would be made up, he would have a full face of paint on and be working behind the bar. And he would camp and carry on. And he would be my earliest recollection of one of the personalities that would be on the bar.

 

MS: Right.

 

MH: And I remember going in there at a very young age, probably when I was in my early, early twenties. And being real uncomfortable and not really knowing how to act, how to behave. And the people that were in there were all experienced. I was like a chicken kind of thing. And that was my first recollection.

 

MS: Was that the first gay bar you ever walked into, do you think?

 

MH: Yeah, probably.

 

MS: And it was in the sixties?

 

MH: Yeah, it was in the sixties.

 

MS: So it was after the whole coffeehouse thing had died down?

 

MH: It was probably around the same period of time. I mean at the time I was old enough to go into bars and I probably went into them. But I didn't find in them anything that I liked. I was not a drinker. I just was not much of a drinker.

 

MS: What kind of bar was Westbury, compared to the other bars. Was it upscale?

 

MH: No, no, no, no. There was no such thing as upscale at that time.

 

MS: Well I guess people have described to me that everyone certainly dressed up to go to the bars. Suit, jackets, and ties.

 

MH: Well, they might have dressed to go into the Drury Lane of the day, or if you went into not Raffles, before Raffles. It's interesting, I am having trouble with names.

 

MS: It's not Maxine's.

 

MH: Maxine's.

 

MS: Maxine’s.

 

MH: Maxine's was a dress-up bar and the Drury Lane was a dress-up bar. Those were the only two dress-up bars.

 

MS: I see.

 

MH: To go into the Westbury was not a dress up.

 

MS: So what would people wear in the Westbury?

 

MH: Just anything, jeans. The two bars that would give you a hard time getting in would be Maxine's and the Drury Lane. To get into the Westbury, there was no problem getting in. You could go in in anything whether it be shorts or whether it be jeans or it be any casual clothing of the day. You could also go into the Allegro, which was on Spruce Street, and that was another bar you didn't have to be dressed to go in. Would you be dressed to go in? I was always rebellious. I always liked to dress down rather than up. So I was always wearing jeans or wearing something that was casual wear of the day. And not being the queen type, I was never as concerned about appearances.

 

MS: Did you know who owned any of the other bars, other than the Westbury?

 

MH: A gentleman named Eddie King owned Maxine's and he died.

 

MS: What do you know about him? Was he gay? Was he straight?

 

MH: I don't know about Eddie King. I know that he was an older gentleman that I used to see. But I don't know what his story was. I was told some time later that one of my cousins was a partner in it.

 

MS: Oh really.

 

MH: I never followed it up. I was told somebody by the name of Katz was involved with it, but I don't know if that was true.

 

MS: You were saying before that one time you remember going to City Hall with someone….

 

MH: Paying off.

 

MS: Paying off.

 

MH: They were paying two hundred dollars a week to not be bothered for protection.

 

MS: This was approximately what period: sixties, seventies?

 

MH: Probably the early seventies. The early seventies it would have been. But I became aware. There is somebody else you could talk to. He has AIDS; he's a lawyer; and he would probably love to talk to you. And he has an office right across the street. Howard Davidson.

 

MS: Why did you just think of him?

 

MH: He opened up a gay bar. First of all, if you talk about payoffs, this guy was so involved. He was an attorney, and as an attorney, he represented the police, the Philadelphia Police Dept. No, he represented the Fraternal Order of Police.

 

MS: Oh right, right.

 

MH: So he represented them as their legal representative, and this goes back, probably to the seventies.

 

MS: But which bar did he own?

 

MH: He opened up a bar called the Camp Williamsburg. It's right now being renovated and somebody he would like to re-open it. Do you know where the Venture Inn is?

 

MS: Uhhuh.

 

MH: Right across from it, at the corner that's closed and looks somewhat dilapidated. He opened that bar up and he opened that bar up probably in the eighties, in the early eighties. Maybe late seventies, early eighties, he opened that bar up. It had to be late seventies, early eighties. But he represented the Police Department as an attorney and he had a contract with them. But he's been involved in the corruption. He's a Jewish lawyer; he's a nice guy; he's got AIDS; he's very talkative. And we're good friends.

 

MS: That would be great. Were you aware of any other gay businesses other than bars? Restaurants? Or bookstores? Or anything like that?

 

MH: Yeah, there weren't many but a lot of good restaurants that were owned by gay people. And as I got older, I started becoming aware of who it was that owned different businesses.

 

MS: Can you think of any in particular? Places, say, that were hangouts for gay people, restaurants or…?

 

MH: Well the Dewey's were the biggest hangouts I can remember, and I can remember a lot of celebrities coming into Dewey's 17th Street late at night. The show business hotel used to be the Warwick. If it was a first-class act, they always booked them at the Warwick. And across the street was a Dewey's that was open twenty four hours a day. And it was not unusual to see Hollywood types in there. Liberace was one of the gay types. We used to see him in there all the time.

 

MS: Is that right?

 

MH: But a lot of the performers who would perform in Atlantic City would very often stay in the Warwick in Philadelphia. And they would drive down there for the night and come back into Philly. There used to be along Broad Street some Lou Tendler's and the Lindy's type of places which were the Jewish delis on Broad Street. And they were popular places. There was a place called the Harvey House. And the Harvey House was a big, big restaurant. It used to stand right near where the Bellevue Stratford is on Broad Street. I think it was adjacent to maybe where the parking garage is today. And it was a place where straight couples would go at night for milkshakes or for sandwiches, or Texas tommies or whatever their specialties were. Big, big place. And a lot of gay people would be in there as well.

 

MS: Yeah.

 

MH: It would be a nice place to go if you wanted to go.

 

MS: Do you remember the sit-in at Dewey's in the mid-sixties?

 

MH: Dewey's 17th, where they started to object to all the gay people who were taking it over at night. Is that what you're referring to?

 

MS: Yeah.

 

MH: I remember it, but I wasn't part of it.

 

MS: O.K. Do you remember the drag queen parade in Center City. It must have been when you were quite young?

 

MH: Well I remember the drag queens that used to parade up and down Locust Street. And I remember Rizzo used to both enjoy them and also harass them.

 

MS: So you went sometimes to that?

 

MH: Well I was on Locust Street a lot of times. I used to be friendly with some of the gay women who worked at the bust-out joints along Locust Street. A lot of them are lesbians. Along Locust Street, for two or three blocks, they used to have bars. They were owned by the Mafia. And they used to have B girls in there who used to hustle the tourists coming in for drinks. They would order drinks; it would be water. They would order champagne; it would be water. And these girls used to work these guys coming in and out at night for money. But these girls were gay. And the sexual promises, all they did was promise; they never did anything. At night they would skip out the back door and then they'd find them in the clubs at night. And there used to be two or three clubs that used to be popular that you'd find them in late at night. And you'd know where they worked, and it was a joke, and they would laugh about somebody that they might have seen, or somebody that they might have….

 

MS: So were the bars mixed? Did you find them to be mixed lesbian and gay?

 

MH: The clubs were mixed. The bars themselves I don't think were mixed. The bars were open only until two and for the most part they were either a woman's bar or a man's bar.

 

MS: What woman's bar do you remember?

 

MH: I remember Rusty's. And I remember the Hideaway.

 

MS: The Hideaway?

 

MH: Mademoiselles, Mademoiselles. It was called the Hideaway recently but it used to be called Mademoiselles. In fact Howard Davidson used to own that place.

 

MS: Ah.

 

MH: So he owned Mademoiselle's as a women's bar. And then he also opened up the Camp Williamsburg.

 

MS: What clubs, then, are you talking about?

 

MH: Well, probably the wildest club was the Zuzu Club, which goes back to that period, and that used to be at the Palumbo Corner. Palumbo Corner is 13th and Locust. It had five bars in it, and on the second floor, it was usually a private club, and it was gay. And it was called different things in different years, but one of the first names that I remember was the Zuzu club.

 

MS: I have encountered two other names, USA&A and the PBA.

 

MH: O.K. USA&A later became the Penrose Club and that's on Locust Street across from the Academy House. It was called the Penrose later on, but it used to be called the USA&A Club. Those names came from the licenses that they had to buy, and quite often whatever name was on the license, that would be the name of the club.

 

MS: I see.

 

MH: So it could very well be called the 34th Democratic Club, and you would be going to the 34th Democratic Club, which was a gay club. That's where those names came from.

 

MS: And the PBA, do you remember that?

 

MH: I remember the name. It was just one. See as they used to lose their licenses with the police putting pressure on them, or if their license used to get violations, they would switch the licenses. Pull one out and put another in, so the names would change.

 

MS: So these were like after-hours clubs, is that it?

 

MH: Yeah.

 

MS: And you said there there was mixing between lesbians and gay men much more?

 

MH: Yeah, that's where you used to see the mixing, in those clubs.

 

MS: And were they operating legally as far as you know?

 

MH: Well the problem with legally is that the fact is that the law says that they could only stay open 'til 3 o'clock in the morning. People would leave the regular bars around one thirty or two. They'd go to the after hours club, but they only had an hour legally. So in order for them to stay open 'til four or five in the morning, they would have to make an arrangement with the police.

 

MS: I see.

 

MH: Back in those days, the police were the enforcement arm for the LCB. And the police in the city used to enforce the liquor laws. That changed a few years ago. And with the change, now the police no longer enforce those laws, although they still have some control. Well, when they used to enforce those laws, all you had to do was make an arrangement with the police that you wanted to stay open 'til five every morning. And if you gave them enough money, you could stay open twenty-four hours a day. They didn't care.

 

MS: I see.

 

MH: So it was always a question of paying them off. In my whole life, I've never paid off a penny to a policeman. Never a penny. Not to anybody. I've just never done it. And I've always stood on principle. It's almost embarrassing going over and listening to some of these things, because all of a sudden you talk about you had a gun. But I've always been kind of conservative. I've always believed in the Constitution and the democratic way. And I've always thought, “I'm not going to bribe anybody. I'm not going to pay anybody off.” If there's a front door, that's the door I go through. I've never gone through a back door. I've never called people for pulls, or favors, or influence. But the only way you survived in Philadelphia for so many years, even today, was really the backdoor. If you want to get something done in City Hall, or especially then, you had to go through a committeeman or you had to go through a political source to get things done.

 

MS: Was there a big investigation of the relations of the police to the bars sometime in the sixties or seventies that you recall?

 

MH: Yeah I do.

 

MS: Do you know anything about it?

 

MH: Yeah I know, I know something about it. I know quite a lot about it. They were investigating all the payoffs of the bars to the police. The joke is that the federal government came in and they were going to clean it up. And during this period, the whole thing stems from the bars being open 'til five in the morning. It was the clubs. O.K., the bars closed at two, and occasionally a bar might stay open a little later, but it didn't mean anything. By two o'clock people were going to the clubs anyway, so there was never an advantage for a bar. But for a club to try to make a living in one hour, they couldn't do it. So the clubs really had a need to stay open later, and they would make arrangements to stay open later. And what happened was the payoffs became so rampant and the complaints from people living in town against the clubs became so numerous that it evoked a whole mood that people knew there was corruption going on. Eventually, I guess, they made complaints to the federal authorities and they came in. The joke is that over the two or three years that they prosecuted all these police officers for taking bribes and payoffs, the clubs were open 'til five o'clock in the morning every single day. And while you're reading about big headlines--twenty police officers go to jail for corruption, for taking bribes, for allowing the clubs to stay open late--the clubs were open every single night during that period. And I kept thinking, “Well, the hammer's going to fall. The club owners are going to get it. They're going to lose their.” They never punished any of the club owners. Mademoiselles, the women's bar, was being operated by a woman called Sally Tyre, T-Y-R-E. Sally lived in this building above the flower shop on the first floor, on the second floor. Sally had formerly been the editor of the Philadelphia Gay News under Mark Segal. And in learning to sell advertising, she had a lot of years over there learning the business. She also learned how to do promotions. And with that, she got a job as a manager of Mademoiselles. And Sally was a very nice gay woman, but she had diabetes and she was under a great deal of pressure because she was running Mademoiselles for Howard Davidson. Howard Davidson was a lawyer and he was very slick and he had an arrangement. They would stay open much later. And Sally Tyre would quite often be the one that would have to take care of the police, give them this envelope or whatever. And she was a very principled person and she wound up with an enormous conflict. In the end, when they had this investigation, she didn't realize that nothing was going to happen to the bar owners, the bar managers. They were going to walk away. Before the investigation concluded and before the police went to jail, she committed suicide upstairs and killed herself in an apartment here.

 

MS: Is that right?

 

MH: I spoke with her the day before she did. I'm the one that called the police and took them up there.

 

MS: Do you remember what year this was, approximately?

 

MH: No. John would probably remember, upstairs. John's worked for me maybe twenty years. That's the blond boy that you met. But well it's a shame that she lost her life, that she gave up her life for that, which is interesting. When she died, she had about nine thousand dollars in the apartment. She had told me that there was money up there. After the police finished going through the apartment, they found twenty-five dollars only, and well it's just part of that whole loss of image, the image we have of our authorities. Because there wasn't any money found. But it's funny; they took all the freezer trays out of the freezer, and they were all sitting on the kitchen counter up there, and there wasn't anything in there. And I came to realize that she had the money hidden in the freezer in a plastic bag and they pulled everything out and searched everything. Took all her jewelry, too.

 

MS: If I could just shift gears again for a minute, did you have encounters with the emerging homophile political movement in the city, either through Clark Polak and the Janus Society or through the Homophile Action League or anything like that?

 

MH: No.

 

MS: In the sixties?

 

MH: No, I really was not. I was busy trying to earn a living and I was busy finding my own way within the gay community.

 

MS: So did you even know of the groups' existence?

 

MH: I knew of the groups' existence because I used to be aware of the people who were involved with it. My first emergence in the gay community in terms of getting involved was with the Gay Community Center over on 4th and South. It wasn't Kater; it was on the first street off of 4th and South. Well actually, when they were first meeting, they were meeting over at the Horizon House.

 

MS: Right.

 

MH: GAA was meeting there. And it was there that the proposal came to open up a gay community center. And I got involved then. Somebody that I was involved with very early on was a fellow named Lee Robbins. Lee Robbins writes for the Gay News; he writes the food column.

 

MS: Right.

 

MH: And we did fundraising to try to raise money.

 

MS: For GAA?

 

MH: Well it was actually for the Gay Community Center.

 

MS: When you say involved with do you mean?

 

MH: Meetings, and I mean fundraising and solicitation and I contributed money and I was involved at that point. That also coincides with Mark Segal and the story I told you earlier about meeting him at a GAA meeting and doing a fundraiser, which was at Backstage on South Street.

 

MS: Yeah, why don't you tell that story again for the purposes of the tape? You had gone to a GAA meeting. Was it the first time you went?

 

MH: No, I had been. I was aware of them and I had walked in on a couple of their meetings. They really were of very little interest. I am more a person that does rather than talks about it. And I went to the meetings to try to get involved and participate. And the one meeting I recall vividly was with Mark Segal, with his long hair. And he was young; he was just around twenty at the time, I would guess. Maybe not even; maybe eighteen or nineteen. And he was asking for a vote on a ten dollar grant to go to Harrisburg to lobby. And he was taking two people with him. And it was supposed to be gas and food for the day for three people. And they were deciding whether or not they could afford to give him ten dollars. But then there was a vote that followed that one, a sixty-nine cent item, for envelopes or something, and I approached him at the end of the meeting and introduced myself and at that point told him you really ought to go for bigger money. I was in business already and I was in real estate. And I already was handling bigger budgets and learning my way and realizing that the thing that was most lacking within our community was really a good foundation and a good basis of income. So at that point I started getting involved in ideas for fundraising and I got involved with Lee Robbins. And I got involved with a few others through GAA, which a lot of those people ultimately became the Gay Community Center of Philadelphia. And I worked with them for a number of years.

 

MS: And you had this fundraiser, you said, where you charged was it a hundred?

 

MH: Well the first fundraiser was a hundred dollars a person, a hundred dollar a plate dinner, at Backstage, over on 4th Street, just off of South.

 

MS: And what was it a fundraiser for?

 

MH: I don't remember the organization that the money went to. It was for the gay community. I don't remember the organization, but I remember that Leonard Matlovich was the speaker that we had there, because he was in the newspapers at the time. But it was Philadelphia's first growing effort at really raising some money.

 

MS: You said thirty-give people.

 

MH: I think we took in $3,400 was the amount. I think that there were forty people there. There were some comps.

 

MS: Mostly men, or mixed, as far as you remember?

 

MH: I remember mostly men.

 

MS: Can I ask you a general question, then, following on that? What would you say about the state of relations between lesbians and gay men in the late fifties and through the sixties? As far as your experience is concerned, were these two groups that mixed very infrequently? Were they groups that mixed sometimes?

 

MH: The men's bars seldom had any women in them. If they did, they were very few. And that's the characterization of the gay bars of that period. The place that they would mix would be the after hours' clubs, because the women didn't really have an after hours' club. And they would want to dance. And in the after hours clubs you could dance. You couldn't dance in the regular bars. So if the women wanted to dance, one with the other, it would be in the club scene, after two or after three o'clock in the morning. That's where you would see them. I think there was a friendly exchange between them, but people were very closeted. I think they were very closeted at the time, and in most situations that was a time when when you wanted to socialize with people, you could only do so much in the bars. I remember that some of the bars would not allow physical contact. There was no dancing in any of the bars. If there was music playing of the day, which they all had, if you stood in front of the jukeboxes, and started to move your rear end a little bit, somebody would yell over and tell you you can't do that. They didn't have licenses to permit dancing back in those days.

 

MS: I see.

 

MH: What used to be is the aspect was private parties in peoples' homes. And I can remember in that period of coming out, you didn't need the bars. Because you'd have, every weekend there would be two or three parties in someone's apartment. And on a Friday or Saturday night, you used to feel your ego was so high because you used to have parties to go to. And you'd be talking to friends, “Which one are you going to? What time are you going to be there?” And a party might be an hour, an hour and a half, and you'd go onto a second one. And then you'd go onto a third one. Then you'd finish up and go to the club, and the club would be at two or three o'clock in the morning.

 

MS: And was there a lot of mixing at the house parties?

 

MH: Parties, at some of the parties there was a lot of mixing between men and women. Because the women gave the appearance of being straight. If the neighbors had anything to say, they would see women coming in.

 

MS: I see.

 

MH: If the police were to raid them, I shouldn't use the word raid. If the police were to respond to a party because of noise and they'd walk in, they'd see women there so it wouldn't arouse a great deal of suspicion.

 

MS: That sounds like it was pretty much not out of feeling close or friendly but more....

 

MH: But it was. It was, because back then, when you were closeted, you had more experiences with women than you do today. Today, now you are out of the closet, and you can just entertain a lifestyle that's strictly men or strictly women. It doesn't matter; they can't bother you. Back then, in your workplace and in your life period, you had far more contact with women. And it was far more necessary to have a cover, to be part of your straight, your seemingly straight lifestyle.

 

MS: And you think there were genuine, but there was also genuine good feelings?

 

MH: Yeah. Yeah, there was good friendship. We shared a common bond.

 

MS: Did lesbians and gay men tend to live in the same parts of the city, do you think?

 

MH: Yeah.

 

MS: Which parts?

 

MH: Well I think the only part of the city that gay people have ever lived in has really been the Center City, the downtown area, or something that's fairly close to it. Close to it meant that it didn't cost as much. If you crossed South Street in Center City, it was always less expensive, once you crossed South Street. If you went down to Queen Village area, that was always very inexpensive. It's now become expensive. If you went into the Northern Liberties section, that was always less expensive.

 

MS: So those were also somewhat gay?

 

MH: Yeah those areas just abound....

 

MS: And when you say Center City, in terms of a gay neighborhood, do you mean all of Center City or particular parts of it?

 

MH: No, it's river to river, and it really is Lombard to Locust. That's all there is; it's really not a big downtown area. It really is. If they had money, they lived west of Broad, and if they didn't have a lot of money, they lived east of Broad. And east of Broad was always far less expensive than west of Broad. Spruce Street used to be so gay in those days that to walk up Spruce Street was an evening of entertainment in itself. It could take two hours just to walk four or five blocks, because there would be so many people sitting on doorsteps and there'd be so many people socializing on the street. And the Merry-go-Round, which I'm sure you've heard reference to, which used to be up on Spruce and Pine and 18th, 19th, in that area, it used to be very friendly. The Day's restaurant used to be a hangout. Day's restaurant was originally right across from Rittenhouse Square, next to the Ethical Society. They had a small building there. And they later expanded into the corner property on 18th and Spruce. But the Day's Deli, it was operated by the Day's family, which was a Jewish family. They were very friendly to gay people and there were always gay people in there, as well as neighborhood straight people in there, and that was another hangout for us. The ice-skating rink at the Suburban Station, that was a very popular gay hangout of the day. And you used to go over there every night. And people would stand on the side of the glass that was part of Suburban Station watching the ice-skaters. And quite often there would be gay people ice skating there, all the time, but it used to be very cruisy to be there, to walk there. The tearoom in the Suburban Station, adjacent to that, was infamous, and the police used to raid it very regularly. They used to try for entrapment back in those days, where they would try to entrap gay people. Entrapment. Entrapment is almost a misnomer in itself. They didn't have to entrap you. All they had to do was look at you and think you were gay and then grab you and drag you in and arrest you and put charges against you. On the way in, they would try to....

 

[interruption]

 

MS: So you were saying about the tearoom. What were the other tearooms around Philadelphia that you knew of?

 

MH: Well all of the department store tearooms were very popular. I am not one of those people, but I know the tearooms in all the department stores, like Wanamakers and Strawbridge and Clothier, were notorious, notorious for activity. And you wanted a date, you just went that way. The Eagle in Wanamakers, the ground floor of Wanamakers, was a very popular hangout for gay people. You just walk into Wanamakers. I remember when I was coming out in my early twenties, I remember I was living on Spruce Street. I would come into Center City on public transportation and walk through Gimbels' Brothers, which used to be between 8th and 9th between Market and Chestnut. And I used to walk through Gimbels, and I would invariably wind up getting picked up or picking somebody up just on the first floor in there. And it was like a regular thing. The department stores were all cruising grounds; a lot of queens worked in them. So you felt comfortable; you didn't feel threatened. But just gay life was so rampant when I came out; it was like everybody does it. There was like nobody that you looked at that you couldn't. It was a great feeling then. Makes you realize what's changed here in our society with AIDS and everything.

 

MS: Maybe I'll finish up with just one other question. Did you do anything, that you recall, on the bicentennial day celebration? I am asking everyone whom I'm interviewing that? Did you participate in any of the day's activities? Did you do anything particularly gay?

 

MH: No, I don't think I did. I really was offended that they had brought out the National Guards, that Rizzo had done that, and that they made such a focus on Philadelphia, that there were going to be demonstrations. I remember being here, but I was really embarrassed for the city that they had brought all this attention and focus to the city as a place of disharmony. And nothing occurred. Nothing violent occurred. There wasn't anything here. But I remember I was very offended that Rizzo had overreacted. It was rather typical for him to overreact.

 

MS: Any final things you want to add?

 

MH: No. I'm sure there's more to talk about and describe in color.

 

MS: It sounds like you think back fondly on those years.

 

MH: I do, but as you grow older you always think back to. You know, it's experience. When you experience things, they become a very difficult part of your life, but when you look back on them, they really wind up being the most colorful days of your life, the fondest days of your life. And as you get older, you look back. The times don't get better particularly. They get worse; they really do. The chaos of today. [?]

 

MS: Well thank you very much.