The Devil's Playhouse: 140 years of Webster Hall

Every city has a venue that works like a core sample: drill down through its layers and you get the whole history of the town in one column. In New York that building stands in the East Village, and it has been throwing parties under the same name since 1886. Webster Hall is not the city's biggest room or its most famous. It is something better — the room where, for fourteen decades, whatever New York was becoming showed up first.

A hall for hire, and for trouble

Charles Rentz designed it in 1886 as a Queen Anne-style hall for hire — weddings, meetings, dances — with an annex added in 1892. The neighborhood decided what it would really be for. Within two years Samuel Gompers was addressing striking brewery workers there; the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union made it a base of operations; and in 1912 Emma Goldman led a march that brought the children of striking millworkers into the hall. Before it was a nightclub, Webster Hall was the labor movement's living room.

The Devil's Playhouse

Then Greenwich Village bohemia found it. Through the 1910s and 1920s the hall hosted masquerade balls so gleefully debauched that the socialist magazine The Masses crowned it the Devil's Playhouse — costume galas where the Village's artists, radicals and everyone in between danced through Prohibition. F. Scott Fitzgerald passed through. So did Langston Hughes. The formula that would define New York nightlife for the next century — art, politics and misbehavior in one room — was invented here, in fancy dress.

The Elvis years

In 1953 the plot twisted: RCA Records took the building and turned it into its East Coast studio. For fifteen years the ballroom's acoustics served Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and Ray Charles; Carol Channing recorded Hello, Dolly! there, Beverly Sills cut her Giulio Cesare, and in 1962 an unknown Bob Dylan played harmonica on someone else's record — his first recording session anywhere. The Devil's Playhouse had become, quietly, one of the most important recording rooms in America.

The Ritz writes the modern era

On May 1, 1980, promoter Jerry Brandt reopened the hall as The Ritz, and for the decade that followed it was the room where the future of rock arrived first — Prince, U2 and Guns N' Roses all played it on their way up, and its pioneering in-club video screen made it the first prominent nightclub to treat music video as part of the show, just as MTV was teaching the world to do the same. In 1992 four brothers from Toronto, the Ballingers, restored the building and gave it back its real name; their Webster Hall ran for twenty-five years and took Pollstar's Nightclub of the Year award in 2017, the same year it closed for its next transformation.

The room keeps winning

The city landmarked the building in 2008 — official recognition that the walls themselves matter. After a ten-million-dollar renovation led by its new operators alongside The Bowery Presents, Webster Hall reopened on April 26, 2019, with Jay-Z on stage and Patti Smith on the early calendar: a Brooklyn king and a downtown saint, which is about as precise a summary of the building as anyone could write. Stand in the Grand Ballroom tonight, under the same roof where Goldman rallied and Elvis sang, and you understand what a venue actually is: not a building that hosts history, but a building that keeps insisting on making more of it. no te limites.