The Eagle's Nest at 142 Eleventh Avenue: 1970 - 2000

The website for the new Eagle at 554 West 28^th Street provides the following history of the former Eagle’s Nest at 142 11^th Avenue:

The Eagle bar originally was a longshoreman’s pub called the Eagle Open Kitchen at 142 11^th Avenue at 21^st Street from 1931 to 1970.  * * *  In 1970, the Eagle Open Kitchen was acquired by Jack Modica who turned the pub into a leather/levi bar.  With a few coats of black paint and an old beat up motorcycle for decoration, an institution was born.  Back in those days it was known as the Eagle’s Nest.  Its patrons loved the isolation and the raw masculinity of this dark playground on the West Side Highway.  Gay bashing by marauding thugs was not uncommon in this remote area of New York.  Nevertheless, the men loved their “home away from home” and were undeterred.  * * *  The Eagle’s closing party at 142 11^th Avenue was March 3-5, 2000.

Scorpio Rising, Leather heaven, enough hide here to reupholster Sloane’s library furniture collection.  Its space, its far-out location, its management . . . , the fifty-cent beer, and the marvelous bulletin board have been responsible for The Eagle’s eclipsing most of the other superbutch bars.  * * *  There’s the usual ritual greeting of hands slapped gingerly on the buttocks, the requisite scowling, chains suspended from the ceiling, ferocious eagle pins, nail-head studded belts, and preying animal stalking, but you get the feeling almost anyone can make out here, whether he’s hidebound or not.

Source:  The Gay Insider by John Francis Hunter (The Olympia Press, Inc.:  New York 1971

A January 18, 1973 article (“Homosexuals in ‘Village’ Fearful After Series of Similar Killings”) by Grace Lichtenstein from the New York Times states:

Three similarly violent murders in three weeks in lower Manhattan involving men the police said were part of the “leather bar” scene have sent waves of rumors and fear through the area’s homosexual community.  All three men were stabbed numerous times and found in apartments apparently deliberately set on fire, according to the police.  The first victim was Ronald Cabo, 29 years old, of 234 Thompson Street, who was found early Jan. 4, dead on a burning couch.  The other two were Donald MacNiven, 40, and John P. W. Beardsley, 53, who occupied separate apartments at 11 Varick Street.  They were found Jan. 8, stabbed to death and lying on the living-room floor of Mr. MacNiven’s apartment.  * * *  According to the police, as well as those active in the homosexual community, rumors have been flying for a week in homosexual bars and bookstores that there have been additional murders, including decapitations and near-killings in the trucking area southwest of Greenwich Village frequented by some homosexuals.  * * *  [T]he police had no suspects as yet, but believed that the men might have been killed by someone they had met in a bar and taken home, since there were no signs of forced entry at either location.  * * *  [Arthur] Bell said . . . that the dead men had been known as patrons of “leather” bars, which cater to homosexuals who dress in leather jackets and dungarees.  They are said by some homosexuals to be synonymous with the “S and M”—sado-masochist—scene.  * * *  One of the bars that reputedly had been favored by the dead men, as well as the “heavy leather” crowd – the Eagle’s Nest at 21^st Street and 11^th Avenue – was not open yesterday afternoon.

An article (“The Gay World’s Leather Fringe”) from the March 24, 1980 issue of Time magazine states:

Do homosexual males consciously seek danger? In Manhattan they go by names like the Eagle's Nest, the Spike, the Mine Shaft and the Anvil. In San Francisco they are called the Brig and the Ambush. They are all homosexual "leather" bars that cater to macho style and sadomasochistic taste. Along with some bathhouses, sex-gadget shops, magazines and private clubs, they make an increasingly visible subculture in the gay world. That leather fringe is now also visible on movie screens, as the backdrop for a film that has been denounced and picketed by homosexuals: William Friedkin's Cruising, the story of a gay murderer in New York City. Some patrons of the leather bars do not seem to mind Friedkin's deadpan, nonjudgmental look at their world; hundreds of them hired on as extras and played themselves onscreen. "The most positive benefit of Cruising," says one extra, "would be for it to make gay men examine their promiscuity, the areas they frequent, the type of sex they seek out, even the thrill of danger. The life we save may be our own." * * * [Hhomosexual homicides are frequent—and often gruesome; dismembered corpses (as in Cruising's first killing) and mutilated genitals are common. One explanation is that homosexual male sex is likely to be more aggressive than heterosexual sex simply because two men are involved. * * *  Many of the S-M practices take place at the bars, including handcuffing, whipping or urinating on a masochistic patron. Gay Writer Arthur Bell calls it "consensual grossness." Recalling a visit to the Mine Shaft, he constructs an unconvincing apologia: "What is happening around you smacks of decadence. But not of evil. These places are not hellholes of murder. There are no victors and victims. It is all theater, and these guys are pussycats." Well, not really. In various Village Voice articles on the leather bars, Bell has made the point that many homosexuals, far from being pussycats, seem to crave danger along with their sex. For example, one of the most popular trysting spots for New York gays in the mid-'70s was a rotting pier in Greenwich Village, where homosexuals regularly risked mugging, fire, police raids and the possibility of falling into the Hudson River through holes in the pier. Why? One theory is that oppression by the straight world has taught many gays to connect sex with guilt, shame and danger. John Devere, editor in chief of the gay magazine Mandate, believes that living underground for so many years has given homosexuals an appetite for the underground. Says he: "The taste for an after-midnight world of exciting [violent] sexuality is not anything to be derided, or taken lightly. It is by now an intrinsic part of many gay men's psychological makeup, and gives texture and meaning to a great many gay lives."   * * *  Devere, who acted as an extra in Cruising, said he was "conscious-stricken" in the role "not because the movie was being made, but because the violence the movie depicts is uncomfortably close to anyone who frequents the night world in any gay area." Says he: "The enemy is not Cruising; it is not outside. The heart of darkness is within, after all. I'm saddened by that, and frightened for us all.