From Gilded Age beer garden to 1970s strip club: 100 years of vice on a Chelsea corner

"There’s a four-story tenement on the traffic-choked corner of Sixth Avenue and 24th Street with some curious signage. Not the store sign for a now-shuttered ground floor cafe, nor the enormous 'for sale' banner spread across the second floor of the facade. (Yikes, is this red-brick beauty in danger?) Signage that’s much more intriguing comes into view when you stand nearby and look up. On the corner of the building, two brownstone nameplates say, well, 'The Corner,' in Victorian-style lettering. Above the cornice is a pediment that reads 'The Corner' with 'Koster & Bial' underneath. So what was The Corner, and who were Koster and Bial? The tenement is all that’s left of a theater and beer garden empire that stretched across Sixth Avenue and offered excess beer, edgy performances, and illicit adventures to libertine New Yorkers. ..."

Ephemeral New York