Manhattan Club

911 Congress Avenue was once home to the popular Manhattan Restaurant, a Jewish deli opened in 1957 by owners David and Flo Robbins in a space previously occupied by Vaught’s Hardware Store. Little known to the general public, however, was the small backroom known as the Manhattan Club, which served as Austin’s first documented gay bar. Patrons entering the cozy, 18-person(ish) backroom bar would pass through the Manhattan Restaurant’s 200-person, two-story dining room with “blue speckled walls and a modern egg crate ceiling.”

Even though The Manhattan Restaurant’s gay-friendly back room was not publicly advertised, the Manhattan Club appears in the 1964-1969 editions of the International Guild Guide, as well as Bob Damron’s 1969 Address Book, an internationally published guide to hidden queer spaces around the globe. Other listings in Austin included The Cabaret (on Guadalupe Street near the UT campus) as well as Club Insomnia, The New Orleans, and Red River Lounge (all on Red River Street). Each listing includes designations to describe its typical patronage, including:

D: Same sex dancing allowed

L: Predominantly lesbian patronage

LJ: Leather bar

OC: Outside cruising

S: Shows/drag

The Manhattan Restaurant met its demise after the passing of David Robbins from a heart attack in 1969. After just over a decade of welcoming queer patrons to the establishment, Flo Robbins was unable to maintain the lease after her husband’s death, and the adjacent photo processing shop took control of the space.

Randy Wicker, a UT student in the late 1950s from New Jersey, later moved on to become a renowned activist in the early homophile and gay liberation movements in New York City. Wicker became the first openly gay man to discuss homosexuality on public radio in 1962, founded the Homosexual League of New York that same year, and led the first public gay protest in New York City in 1964. Wicker was a patron of the Manhattan Club during his time in Austin, and an August 2022 interview with him and the author revealed much about what it was like to experience the bar, including how it became incredibly crowded on University of Texas game days, proving that queer visitors to Austin would use the guides to find spaces with like-minded patrons.

After businesses fled downtown in the second half of the 20th century, the building and its neighbors stood abandoned for several decades. Numerous schemes—including proposals from local architecture firm Hatch Ulland + Owen and international firm HKS—passed through the Historic Landmarks Commission from 2015 to 2021, and the site has been the topic of several UT architecture studio courses, including a 2022 historic preservation studio led by Lecturer Daniel Scott titled “Reclaiming Ruins.” In the meantime, plywood boards on the lower doors and windows provided graffiti artists with a blank canvas. Ultimately, the trio of buildings was demolished in August 2024. – John Stenzel