The Lion's Head: "Drinkers with Writing Problems"

Sheridan Square overlooks "Dave Van Ronk Way." (Sign is in the distance.) The square is not far from Christopher Park, near where the Stonewall riots took place, but the locations are not the same.

NPS / John Warren

Straight Folk Singer Arrested at Stonewall

Two doors down from the Stonewall Inn was one of the better-known bars and restaurants in New York City literary history.¹ The walls of the Lion’s Head were covered with jacket covers of books by the writers who drank there—“drinkers with writing problems,” as its customers liked to say. For a writer, getting a space on the wall was like winning the Nobel Prize.²

It could not have been more different from the Stonewall. The latter was owned by members of organized crime, had no liquor license and pretended to be a private "bottle" club. Bartenders did not even wash customers' dirty glasses, but only rinsed them. Outbreaks of hepatitis were linked with the Stonewall.³

The “straight” Lion’s Head, on the other hand, served good liquor in clean glasses. It held a legitimate liquor license and also a good reputation among NYC writers. The Clancy Brothers played for awhile as the house band. Actress Jessica Lange was one of the aspiring actresses who waited tables. Actor Rod Steiger got his mail delivered there. Author Peter Hammill said, "You'd have poets at one end of the bar and stockbrokers at the other, and the stockbrokers would be talking about poetry and the poets would be talking about money."⁴

Dave Van Ronk, a well-known folk musician, was at the Lion’s Head celebrating his birthday with friends in the early morning of June 28, 1969, when they heard commotion down the street. He stepped out to see what was going on. Although Van Ronk himself was heterosexual, he stayed to support the crowd. “As far as I was concerned,” he said, “anybody who’d stand against the cops was all right with me...”⁵

Inspector Seymour Pine tackled the tall musician himself. Pine said he saw Van Ronk wound an officer by pitching coins at him. Van Ronk put up a fight, but was taken prisoner just as the police were barricading themselves inside the bar. Van Ronk claimed that officers kicked him as he lay on the floor.

Along with the bar managers and men in women’s clothing, Van Ronk was arrested and taken into custody. By 4 A.M., the streets belonged to the Tactical Police Force. But the dawn was about to break on a new day when the rebellion would continue.

The Lion’s Head closed in 1996. Today, part of Sheridan Square (not here, but just south of Christopher Park) has been renamed “Dave Van Ronk Way.”

Footnotes

1. Herszenhorn, David M. "Closing the Book on a Saloon For Drinkers With Writing Problems," New York Times, Oct. 14, 1996. Retrieved June 26, 2019.
2. Deignan, Tom. "The Lion's Head: Gone But Not Forgotten," IrishAmerica.com, February/March 2007. Retrieved June 26, 2019.
3. Carter, David. Stonewall: The Riots That Sparked the Gay Revolution, St. Martin's Press, 2004, pp. 155-157.
4. Herszhenhorn, loc.cit.
5. Carter, op.cit., pp. 155-157.