New York's Bowery at the end of the nineteenth century was nothing if not a colorful avenue, and one of the more prevalent colors was red. Blood red, to be specific. This was the era of clip joints, blind tigers, and groggeries with names like Tub of Blood, The Morgue, and Hell's Gate, which were frequented by unsavory characters such as Piker Ryan and his Whyo gang, Monk Eastman, and Owney Geoghegan, a former pugilist turned "brewer, barkeeper and brawler."

The most notorious dive to be immortalized in urban folklore was owned by an Irish immigrant named John H. McGurk. Born in 1853, McGurk immigrated to the United States at the age of seventeen. Sources are sketchy about his early days in the country. He may have attended school in Providence, Rhode Island in 1880, or worked as a "heater's helper" in Reading, Pennsylvania. By 1885 he was in New York, where he fell in with the Tammany Hall crowd and opened a succession of clip joints around the Bowery such as The Mug, Sailor's Snug Harbor, and The Merrimac. All of these suffered frequent police raids under Mayor Hewitt's administration and each one eventually shut down. There was nothing to indicate his next venture would be any different.

McGurk's Saloon, as it was originally called, opened in 1895 at 295 Bowery in a brick five-story tenement building that had once been a hotel frequented by union soldiers during the Civil War. Located in the heart of the old Red Light District, the saloon had the distinction of sporting one of the first electric signs in the city. The clientele typically consisted of sailors, pickpockets, panhandlers, waterfront thieves, gang members, morphine addicts, and prostitutes—or as the police reports frequently described them, "women of no occupation." Entertainment was provided by singing waiters and a small band. Whiskey was the drink of choice, selling for five cents a glass. Liquor was often mixed with water and liquid camphor (also used as moth repellent and embalming fluid) to strengthen the drink—sometimes fatally. Waiters were armed with chloral hydrate (the ever-popular Mickey Finn) for doping unsuspecting guests as preparation for back alley robbery, or worse. Secret passages provided a means for hasty exits in the event of raids. These emptied out behind the saloon into Horseshoe Alley, which was reportedly pitch black even in the daylight.

The saloon was run by a lively staff who more often than not boasted criminal records. The headwaiter was Charles "Short-Change Charley" Steele, once arrested for burglary and attempted murder, but released when none of the witnesses could identify him. A bouncer named John Sullivan, alias Charles Moon, would be charged with illegal voting and sentenced to Sing Sing for two and a half years. The manager, Bart O'Connor, was arrested for illegal registration, having promised men free lodging and all the drinks they wanted if they voted for the Tammany ticket. According to rumors another McGurk employee was Commodore Dutch, a freeloader and con artist later famous for his forty year stint chairing a "society" whose sole purpose was to collect funds for himself. He later became a regular at McSorley's Old Ale House. Also on the roster was a piano player named Ray Walker who later gained fame as a composer of pre-World War I popular songs such as "Funny Bunny Hug," "Yiddisha Rag," "Fido is a Hot Dog Now," and "How Do You Like Your Oysters?"

And of course on hand as "mayhem specialist" was a pock-marked ex-prizefighter with cauliflower ears known as Thomas "Eat 'Em Up Jack" McManus who, according to a newspaper account of the time, wore "a flaming cerise tie and a derby at a tilted angle." His official role was that of "sheriff," which was essentially an armed bouncer. He was regularly rounded up by police as a suspicious character, and arrested numerous times for assault, but always released when the victims refused to press charges. Once he nearly tore the ear off an opponent whom he accused of squealing to the police.

What distinguished McGurk's Saloon from the other roughneck dives on skid row was that it soon became the suicide den of choice for Bowery prostitutes down on their luck. Figures are hazy, but there were reportedly from six to a dozen self-administered deaths in the year 1899 alone. Swallowing carbolic acid was the most popular method of offing oneself. Later known as Phenol, carbolic acid was typically used as a disinfectant and was easily available at pharmacies. As it causes severe chemical burns when coming in contact with skin, ingesting carbolic acid is not the most pleasant way to die. Eyewitness accounts of such suicides often include the description "writhing in agony." Phenol injections would later be used as a mean of extermination by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau, first injected into the veins of the victim, then later, perhaps in a time-saving gesture, injected directly into the heart.

Blonde Madge Davenport and Big Mame were two such prostitutes who chose the carbolic acid route, possibly mixing the acid into their booze to make it more palatable. Blonde Madge died of internal chemical burn. Big Mame was less successful. She spilled most of the acid on her face, disfiguring herself, which got her permanently barred from the saloon. Another casualty named Tina Gordon soon followed and still others may have thrown themselves from a high window. The suicides "got to be quite a fad," an observer later recounted, and the saloon was quickly rechristened McGurk's Suicide Hall as a shrewd marketing ploy to attract the morbidly curious. John McGurk even strung together a speech to recite over the bodies: "Most of the women who come to my place have been on the down grade too long to think of reforming. I just want to say that I never pushed a girl downhill any more than I ever refused a helping hand to one who wanted to climb." The waiters and bouncers got to be fairly astute at spotting the potential suicides ahead of time and developed tactics for ousting them off McGurk property before they could succumb.

The suicides were not just relegated to the saloon and newspapers of the time were chock full of such accounts. A woman was found dead in a hotel room at the Oxford Hotel, just up the street at 303 Bowery. There was a nearly empty bottle of carbolic acid beside her, and her male companion was nowhere to be found. The Oxford Hotel was believed by the police captain to have been owned by McGurk.

With this kind of reputation the police couldn't be kept away for long. There were countless raids on the saloon, often led by an Inspector Cross. Newspapers gave lurid accounts of sailors and gamblers, women "conducting themselves indecorously" and all manner of "indiscretions" happening in the upstairs rooms. McGurk was frequently charged with "running a disorderly house."

By 1899 reform was in the air. Governor Theodore Roosevelt and Republican state legislators established a committee headed by Assemblyman Robert Mazet to investigate corruption in Tammany Hall. It wasn't long before they turned their attentions to dens of ill-repute. The Mazet committee got a lot of mileage out of the testimony of a sixteen-year-old streetwalker named Emma Hartig who had survived a carbolic acid suicide attempt. In 1902 Seth Low was elected as reform mayor and under his administration McGurk's Suicide Hall shut down for good.

Tom McManus, by now having acquired a second moniker of "The Brute," opened a music hall of his own called Eat 'Em Up Jacks. By 1905 he was back to working as a bouncer at a dive appropriately called The Folly. That year he got in a dispute over a woman with a notorious gangster named Chick Tricker who owned a joint of his own called The Fleabag. A pistol duel left Tricker with a bullet in his leg and one of his associates with six knifewounds. The next day, as McManus was leaving The Folly someone crept out of an alley and cracked his skull with an iron bar wrapped in newspaper. His murderer was never arrested, nor his identity satisfactorily revealed. A boxer named Tony "Kid Tuths" Cio was arrested under suspicion and later released, though some accounts say the killer was probably an associate of Tricker's named Sardinia Frank. The most likely suspect, Chick Tricker, had an airtight alibi—he lay recovering in St. Vincent's Hospital.

Philip McKenzie, who was McGurk's nephew and a business partner, understandably had a falling out with McManus after McManus kicked out one of his eyes in a dispute. McKenzie and a bartender were arrested in 1900 after following a man out of the Suicide Hall, after presumably slipping him a mickey, where they proceeded to beat and rob him. He was sentenced to a reformatory and died of heart disease in 1905.

During the Suicide Hall's heyday a woman known as the "Pride of the Stevedores" and her husband Big Barney were regulars at the saloon. They would waltz down the middle of the saloon as everyone would push their tables against the wall to clear space. Big Barney and the woman later disappeared. She resurfaced many years later with a new husband named Billy the Gink, called so because his right eye had been knocked out. By then the woman was known as Deaf Lilly, and in 1910 Billy the Gink beat her to death in their apartment and fled.

As for John H. McGurk, he made a killing in the real estate racket. Among his property was the Avondale Flats apartment on 77th Street, which suffered $4000 in damage when a fire broke out, and the Raines Law Hotel at 110 Third Avenue, which was described by Magistrate Henry Brann as "a resort for disorderly women and thieves." In 1902 he absconded to Riverside, California with his wife Louisa, his daughter Martina, and $500,000 in tow, presumably to escape conviction. He forfeited $1000 in bail when he didn't appear for court after being charged with "keeping a disorderly house." His counsel explained to the court that McGurk was ill in a sanitarium, though it was common knowledge that he had fled to the west coast. McGurk died in California on January 29, 1913 at the age of 59.

The Suicide Hall was a natural for literary material. Soon after it closed a play appeared by Theodore Kremer called The Bowery After Dark, which was partially set there. The Hall also provides the setting for Mae West's novel Diamond Lil, in which the second chapter is titled "Suicide Hall." In 1994 a theatre group called Elevator Repair Service performed a play called McGurk: A Cautionary Tale.

As for the building itself, from World War I until the 1950s it was known as the Liberty Hotel, a Skid Row flophouse with a sign above the door that read "When did you write to mother?" During Prohibition the demise of McGurk's was exalted as a sign of prohibition's success. In the mid-60s it was converted into an artist co-op and became a refuge for women artists, such as the feminist writer and sculptor Kate Millett and the photographer and furniture maker Sophie Keir. Millett lived there for thirty-eight years until the tenants were evicted in 1999 by the Cooper Square Urban Renewal Project who wanted to demolish the building and put up a modern residential-business complex.

In the nineties the legend of McGurk's Suicide Hall was revitalized by its appearance in Luc Sante's Low Life. Still, the Landmarks Preservation Commission denied landmark status to the building, after deciding that it did not have "sufficient historical, cultural or architectural merit."

During the building's final years a wheatpaste poster of a skull talking on a cordless phone hung from the fourth story of the outside wall. It was later joined by a large sign which pleaded "Save 295 Bowery," as well as laminated articles describing the history of the building, stapled at eye-level.

In 2005, the building which housed McGurk's Suicide Hall was bulldozed by Avalon Bay Communities to make way for their Avalon Bowery Place apartment complex. Avalon Bay advertised their new development as "one of Manhattan's finest locations in Soho," despite the fact that the site lies a block north of Houston. A relocated Millett derided it as "housing for yuppies." Future residents should not be surprised to discover their crisp new apartments haunted by the ghosts of women of no occupation, rifling through the medicine cabinet in search of an antidote.