There’s nothing secret about KGB Bar, the Soviet-inspired literary outpost in the East Village. Writers—both esteemed and unknown—have been doing readings there for twenty years. But the Red Room above KGB, which traces its roots back to Prohibition, is another story.
Outside on the street, a neon sign announces KGB, but there’s no indication of the Red Room. The building on East 4th Street that houses both bars, as well as the Kraine Theater, was originally a tenement building. In the 1950s and ’60s, the Ukranian Labor Home, a social club for Ukranian socialists, occupied the building. They hosted banquets on the first floor and operated their own private speakeasy on the second floor. But before the Ukranian Labor Home bought the building in 1948, notorious gangster Lucky Luciano ran a speakeasy called the Palm Court there.
The post Inside the Red Room, the Secret Bar Above East Village Literary Outpost KGB first appeared on Untapped Cities.