Remembering Terminal Bar, a Lost LGBTQ Landmark Near Times Square

Across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal, at 41st Street and Eighth Avenue, Terminal Bar occupied a rough-edged corner of Times Square that became part of New York’s LGBTQ history. The bar began with a mainly Irish American clientele, but its identity changed over time. By the years documented in its surviving photographs, Terminal Bar was predominantly African American and gay.

That history is preserved in images made by Sheldon Nadelman, who worked as the bar’s bartender from 1972 through 1982. His photographs captured former patrons during the final decade of the bar’s existence, creating a visual record of a nightlife space that was both specifically local and connected to the wider social world around Times Square and the Port Authority.

Terminal Bar closed in 1982, but it continued to appear in New York’s cultural record. Martin Scorsese featured the bar in Taxi Driver. Three years after its closure, Scorsese returned to the name in After Hours, where a SoHo pub called the Emerald Pub served as the stand-in for the no-longer-operating bar.

The bar also became the subject of Terminal Bar, an American documentary short directed by Stefan Nadelman, Sheldon Nadelman’s son. The film combines animation, live action and black-and-white photographs from the collection. Its approach links a family archive to the people and place represented in it, allowing the former patrons’ images to remain at the center of the story.

Sheldon Nadelman’s photographs were later collected in the 2014 book Terminal Bar: A Photographic Record of New York’s Most Notorious Watering Hole. The bar was also featured in a 1982 novel titled The Terminal Bar.

For LGBTQ New Yorkers, Terminal Bar is notable not simply because it appeared in films, but because the surviving record documents a shifting neighborhood venue where gay patrons—particularly within a predominantly African American crowd—formed part of the bar’s public identity. Its story illustrates how places that may have seemed temporary or marginal can become important historical evidence after they disappear. Today, the photographs, documentary and related works offer ways to revisit a vanished Times Square gathering place without reducing it to a movie location or a nickname for old New York grit.

Source and reuse information This backgrounder adapts factual material from “Terminal Bar (bar)” on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminal_Bar_(bar) The adapted text is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license (CC BY-SA 4.0): https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/. This story has not been independently reviewed or fact-checked.

Further links listed by the Wikipedia page (not independently checked): - https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/27/nyregion/keeping-terminal-bar-and-a-grittier-new-york-city-alive-in-historys-memory.html?_r=0 - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0344437/ - https://books.google.com/books?id=z2MuWAB3CSIC&q=the+roughest+bar+in+town+Orde+Coombs&pg=PT207 - https://web.archive.org/web/20080905111437/http://www.movie-locations.com/movies/a/afterhours.html - https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Terminal_Bar_(bar)&params=40.7563_N_73.990108_W_ - https://web.archive.org/web/20110606104924/http://www.nypress.com/article-6520-terminal-bar-punch-drunk-love.html Image rights Photograph description: Interior of Oyster Bar Restaurant , in Grand Central Terminal , New York City, USA. Photographed by Daniel Case 2006-12-29 Creator: Daniel Case at English Wikipedia. License: CC BY 2.5 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5). Original image page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AOyster_Bar.jpg. The image was resized for display; no other changes were made.