Singing Waiters

Sammy's Bowery Follies, the nationally known Gay Nineties saloon where drunks and swells, drifters and celebrities, the rich and the forgotten have mingled for 36 years in rowdy laughter and melancholy song, closed its doors for the last time at 3 A.M. yesterday. The establishment at 267 Bowery, between Houston and Stanton Streets, was sold to the city last week and closed to make way for a sprawling Cooper Square urban renewal project. Its once booming business —it catered to 100,000 pa trons a year during World War II and the postwar years —had fallen off sharply in the last few years under the pressures of inflation and television. Its failure was also hastened by the death last year of its founder, owner and star personality, Sammy Fuchs. Spirited Melting Pot Sandwiched among flop houses, missions, bars and liquor stores along New York's avenue of institutional alcoholism, the Follies had become over the years a sym bol of the city's melting pot, a place where the prosperous and the impoverished could drink elbow‐to‐elbow and sing along with aging, pas sionately prunefaced vaude ville entertainers. For many who had known the noisy, smoky, beautifully beerish saloon, with its creaky wooden floors and drearily muraled walls, the closing was the end of an era. The disappearance of the Follies, however, is viewed by the city as only the begin ning of the end of an era on the Bowery. Eventually, six large parcels of land along the east side of the Bowery between Stanton and East Fifth Streets will be com pletely revitalized, if the Cooper Square Development Plan is followed. Bleak storefronts, where derelicts sag and sleep in doorways, crumbling tene ments and ancient office buildings will eventually be supplanted by more than 1,000 apartments for low‐and middle‐income families. The project, whose ultimate cost has not been cal culated, is designed not only to provide housing, but to restore a measure of dignity to an area that over the decades has become the motif of alcoholic degradation and futility in the city. It was that motif that provided the “atmosphere” for Sammy's Bowery Follies, and many loved it. For the 25 employes of the Follies—waiters, cooks, bar tenders, musicians and singers, many of whom had worked there for 10 to 20 years — the closing meant looking for other jobs or, in a few cases, retirement. But the 700 patrons who arrived for a last fling at the Follies on Saturday night and early yesterday morning turned what might have been a wake into a rousing fare well party for the establish ment, its entertainers and its owner, Mrs. Bessie Fuchs, who has run the place since her husband's death on April 3, 1969. Songs and Sympathy There were tourists who arrived in buses, uptowners who came in Cadillacs, old timers off the street and old friends of the management. They sang old favorites, swapped sentimental stories, offered condolences and ex amined the fixtures, antique lamps, furnishings and framed memorabilia on the dark stained walls. Everything removable in the place will be sold at auc tion next Wednesday at noon, according to Mo Drucker, manager of the Follies for the last 25 years. Mrs. Bessie Fuchs, a short, dark haired woman in a white, sleeveless dress, wandered among the crowded tables early yesterday morning, look ing tired but exchanging warm greetings. “Sammy always did all the talking,” she said. “I was just his wife. He mingled with the biggest and the lowest, and they all loved him. The place just hasn't been the same without him.” Vaudeville Beats Jukebox The Follies was always a family business. Founded in 1934, the year after Prohibi tion ended, it was at first “just a saloon with a juke box,” Mrs. Fuchs said. Sammy Fuchs soon began hiring former vaudevillians, how ever, and the Gay Nineties atmosphere sent the fortunes of the Follies skyrocketing. “We used to pack them in from wall to wall,” Mrs. Fuchs said. The patrons in cluded scores of politicians and entertainment celebrities —all the Mayors of New York, President John F. Kennedy, Jimmy Durante, Lillian Roth, Carol Channing, Chris tine Jorgensen, Monique Van Vooren. Their pictures, taken with arms wrapped around Sammy, began lining the walls up to the 15‐foot ceiling. Also tacked up on the walls were a score of plaques honoring Sammy Fuchs, “the Mayor of the Bowery,” for a variety of deeds: He estab lished a free dental clinic for Lower East Side children; set up a “Bum of the Month” program in which he sobered up, reclothed and found em ployment for derelicts; and, in apparently hopeless cases, served as a financial go between for derelicts and their shamed (and often wealthy) families. Though Sammy did not encourage the drinking patron age of derelicts; he fed them regularly. His daughter, Mrs. Arlene Katz, told yesterday how, the day before one of his annual Thanksgiving din ners for derelicts, a truck carrying crates of live turkeys crashed into a lamppost out side, and the crates broke open. The derelicts, seeing their dinner running off, moved briskly and, in a rare display of concerted action, recap tured the birds. Lucille, Goldye and Julie As always, early yester day, the star attractions were the aging vaudeville singers —full‐bosomed, starkly made up grandmothers in floor length gowns and wide brimmed picture hats, glit tering with beads and span gles and impossibly golden hair. Their names might have been known years ago at the Palace Theatre and the Metropole, in the Earl Carroll Vanities or the Georgie White Scandals. But on the Follies’ stage, the announcement of their names—Lucille Donor, Goldye Shaw, Julie Christina —was lost in trie clamor of applause and raucous demand. It made no difference. They sang, louder and harder than Ethel Mennen, such old favorites as “Melancholy Baby,” “Rosie O'Grady,” “My Gal Sal,” “In the Good Old Summertime,” and “There's No Business Like, Show Busi ness.” Some in the crowd, not content with singing along and clapping, mounted the stage at various times to join the singers. Bartender and Bouncer In the audience was Henry Davis, the original Follies bartender, who claimed to have perfected the “art of bouncing” nasty customers. “No rough stuff, just talk—that's the key,” he said. There were others: Suzanne La Chic,” “Mack the Bum Off Broadway,” characters all. When it was over, Goldye Shaw said: “I don't know what I'm going to do now. I'm too sad to think, too sad to care.” But Jeanne Jordan, a bar tender at the Follies for 18 years, said she had arranged an interview this week for a job as a bartender at Mc Sorley's, the alehouse whose century‐old men‐only policy was recently overturned by a court order and, a city law. “It's the end of one era and the beginning of another,” she said.FUCHS, SAMUEL was born 13 October 1903, received Social Security number 096-12-2645 (indicating New York) and, Death Master File says, died April 5, 1969. Source: Death Master File (public domain). Check Archives.com for SAMUEL FUCHS. ($)