Queer Place:
2831 Valentine Ave, The Bronx, NY 10458
The Blue Parrot Café, 162 E 52nd St, New York, NY 10022
Sea Shack, Lewis Walk, Cherry Grove, NY 11782
Cherry Grove Beach Hotel, 1 Ocean Walk, Fire Island, NY 11782
Ice Palace, 57 W 57th St, New York, NY 10019

Jimmy Merry with Calvin Klein and Don ArmentiJames Vincent "Jimmy" Merry (August 19, 1928 – 1987) was an American entrepreneur. The Grove hotel, bars, and restaurants were about to be transformed through the leadership of one of the most colorful and interesting characters in its history, Jimmy Merry. The first gay businessman in Grove history, he came to own the entire commercial district; his dictatorial methods and business acumen changed the resort into a tourist attraction and earned him undying enemies and devoted admirers.

James Vincent "Jimmy" Merry was born in Brooklyn, New York. Former employees said he had grown up an illiterate orphan on the streets of New York City. During a stint in the Navy he was thrown into the brig because of his homosexuality and came out of the Navy deeply changed—he had become a lifelong gay nationalist, and a jailor had taught him to read. Although he devoted his life to making money from the gay community, he also set a much higher standard for his bar patrons and for his gay workers than either had hitherto enjoyed, and toward the end of his life he attempted to forge an alliance between his bar business and the gay liberation cause.

Back in civilian life with no resources, Merry found work in the early 1950s mafia-owned bar scene on Manhattan’s east side. Ray Mann remembered first seeing him at the Intermezzo in 1954, “behind the bar in his shirtsleeves, doing drinks and rustling beers . . . very Irish, very New York, New York accent, and he was a hustler, I mean in business.” Industrious to a fault and with a personal dynamism that attracted patrons, Merry was soon bartending at the eight or so gay male bars, like the Swan and the Blue Parrot, along Lexington Avenue from 45th to 60th Street that patrons called the Bird Circuit.

In 1947 a good-looking twenty-eight-year-old Italian immigrant named Ernesto Tenente (February 18, 1920 - January, 1988) was invited to the Grove by a man he had met at a party in New York. He fell in love with the place and managed to stay by working as the chef in Pat Stephani’s newly opened restaurant, where he not only cooked but also entertained patrons with his wonderful operatic renditions. Tenente was possibly the Grove’s first gay employee, drawn to the place by more than wages. About 1956, two Sayville men who were starting a small Grove restaurant offered Ernesto better money. After one season the two owners had a falling out and wanted to sell. Casting about for a potential buyer, Ernesto approached Jimmy Merry, a fellow worker at the Intermezzo, a gay men’s bar in Manhattan. “I said, ‘Listen, this place is for sale. . . . There’s a good opportunity but I no have the money and if you have the money there’s a goldmine.’ And he said, ‘You gonna be there with us?’ and I say, ‘Yes.’”

Jimmy Merry went into the venture with his friend Kenny Hoerig, also a bartender at gay bars around the city. George Sardi, who tended bar for Jimmy Merry for twelve years in the Grove and in New York City, said: “I don’t know anything about finances, but I think he and Kenny were backed by somebody. Who that was I don’t know, because I’ve heard so many pros and cons I wouldn’t even mention anything if I could remember it.” Dick Addison, talented Grove drag performer, had never worked for Jimmy, but said he knew “shady” lawyers and loan sharks from “personal connections” and agreed about the shadowy nature of Jimmy’s money and business associates: “I’ve always been told that anything you would think is, isn’t, and what is, you wouldn’t know about... but Jimmy himself was partially a front for people with bigger money.”

The original Sea Shack was nothing more than a small house converted to a bar and restaurant, but under Jimmy Merry’s management it became the true successor to Duffy’s, with a “cozy bar and fireplace,” good hamburgers and chili, an appealing juke box, and a big deck with stairs down to the ocean, where people gathered in the late afternoon for barbecues. Grovers had never accepted the new Cherry Grove Hotel, which was too obviously run for a quick buck by outsiders. Duane Urbanik spoke for most when he said, “I never gravitated towards the hotel; I don’t know why. I found it a very unattractive place.” But they loved the Sea Shack and over the course of two decades Jimmy Merry turned his initial success into a commercial monopoly—he eventually owned virtually all of Cherry Grove’s downtown area—and became a wealthy man. Beloved by many of his employees, feared by his competitors, and hated by conservative Grovers, who saw him as the devil’s gateway for commercialization, Jimmy Merry was only about thirty when he took over the Sea Shack around 1959.

Grovers remembered him as a tall thin man in his trademark white socks and loafers, intense, hot-tempered, and physically fearless. Hard-drinking and with a penchant for pretty young men whom he treated less than well, he “lived all his life in the fast lane,” said a former employee, and died before he reached the age of sixty. Like Edward Duffy, Jimmy was a hands-on owner/manager; unlike him he was part of the gay life of the community. He soon moved to a house on the dunes next to the Sea Shack, and was, according to Jan Felshin and Edrie Ferdun, who lived just down the walk, a “good neighbor.” People confided in him, and he “became friend to a lot of people out here,” said Jack Sonshine, who had also known him from the Bird Circuit.

Merry entered into every aspect of community life that his late hours allowed. Years after Ernesto Tenente had worked for him, Jimmy Merry sent him a monthly retirement check to supplement his meager social security income. In the eyes of his former bartender, George Sardi, Jimmy “had a heart of gold—heart of gold. He was a person who held nothing in, and he would scream and holler and rant and rave. It might go on for five minutes. After that five minutes it’s all over, and he’s just as fine, as peaceful as can be. He’s got out what he wanted to say. That was it. Period. . . . He had a wonderful, wonderful sense of humor, which was great. . . . And he was very misunderstood. He was an old softie. He really was, I mean for people who knew him. Yeah, I’d do anything for him." Ernesto Tenente summed up Jimmy’s personality most colorfully: “Lot of people in the Grove say, ‘Oooh, Jimmy,’ Tenente growled they say, ‘always bark.’ But like they say, ‘when the dog bark, they don’t bite.’ I really love him. Always help me, wonderful . . . for me it’s a great, great man.”

Jimmy Merry not only catered to gays, he ran the Cherry Grove Hotel, along with his bars and restaurants, as gay establishments. Edward Duffy had hired mainly local people like Long Islander Pat Stephani to work for him, and Pat herself mainly employed locals and members of her family. Jimmy Merry’s help, in contrast, was drawn from his contacts in New York City gay bars and restaurants, where the workers were gay, which opened the Grove to a group of gay people of more limited means. In dealing with his gay staff, Merry was a remarkable employer, tough but fair. He drew on his energy and his intimate knowledge of the business to lead by example, turning his hand to whatever needed doing, according to George Sardi. After Jimmy took over the Cherry Grove Beach Hotel in 1962, he housed his employees in damp and mildewed rooms that employees referred to as “kitty city” or “the compound.” When the Sea Shack was expanded in 1966, he had rooms built under it especially for them, and although “he thought he was doing them a great favor,” said Stephan Cole, it was not an unqualified success. In 1960, which was the Sea Shack’s first or second year under Jimmy’s stewardship, a young woman named Lois (Mac) McIntosh, who had been tending bar in New York City lesbian bars, heard there was work in the Grove. Jimmy hired her as a waitress, and when she proved capable promoted her to bartender—an unheard of opportunity for a woman in a mixed-gender gay bar. Many people thought that Jimmy Merry was the first to hire black help. In fact, Edward Duffy had actually had a black cook, but Jimmy Merry was the first to hire black gay people as waiters, employees who would deal directly with white customers. During the early sixties, Jimmy hired black gay singer, host, and bar manager Jimmie Daniels to manage the Tiffany Room restaurant. George Sardi thought Jimmy hired women and blacks because of “strong feelings” he had about equality. The writer Joan Nestle remembers dancing with a woman in the Sea Shack in the summer of 1962, when a female employee came up and inserted two fingers between them to indicate that they had been dancing too close. Whenever Jimmy Merry had to enforce the no-dancing-together rules, George Sardi remembers, he’d say with bitter irony, “Well, you know it’s not legal! Being a homosexual yourself, you know, is not legal.” Although Jimmy Merry wasn’t able to stop raids on the Meat Rack, many narrators said he usually knew when they were planned. When Chief Bridge of the Brookhaven police called restaurant owner Pat Stephani on the carpet to find out how Grovers knew when raids were coming, she shot back: “‘I’ll tell you how I know. Your men tell Jimmy Merry and Jimmy Merry tells me and I tell my customers.’ And after that, he never bothered me again.” Merry maintained a bail fund, with which the bail out men who were arrested for having sex in the Meat Rack.

As early as 1962, Ernesto’s predictions of a gold mine in the Grove were coming true. About that time, Jimmy and his backers acquired the Cherry Grove Beach Hotel. It had been, said Ted Drach, “a pretty dismal place,” and Jimmy tried to attract patronage by opening a restaurant in it called the Tiffany Room, also designed by Arthur Brill. It was rather formal, painted dark green, with Tiffany lamps of varying authenticity hanging over each table. Ernesto Tenente was the chef and Jimmie Daniels the maitre d’. The Tiffany Room never really caught on, and the ever astute Merry dropped it after a season or two. Later on he opened a more congenial restaurant and hired another longtime Grover as maitre d’, the affable and charming Stephan Cole, who had decided to retire from the theater world. By 1963 his only competitor restaurant was Pat’s. There seems to have been plenty of business for both Pat’s and the Sea Shack, but Jimmy wanted to control the field and suggestions that “competition was good for business” fell on deaf ears. Even though Pat wanted to sell (perhaps because Jimmy Merry had been, as she said, “a source of unending aggravation”), she fiercely resisted his efforts to buy her out. It says something about Jimmy’s ruthlessness that he worked out a deal with a third party to buy Pat’s and resell to him without her knowledge. Jimmy had Arthur Brill remake Pat’s into a nightclub called the Club Atlantique, which opened in 1964. Using their economic clout and the sophistication of their gay audiences, the mafia also backed the Bon Soir nightclub in Greenwich Village to reach into the legitimate entertainment market. Jimmy brought out New York “name” performers whom he judged would draw gay audiences, like Carmen McRea, Sylvia Simms, Kay Ballard, Dionne Warwick, and Della Reese. Although shows were “always sold out”—people came by beach buggy and water taxi from other Fire Island communities and even from New York City to hear the stars—the Club Atlantique “never took off,” according to Bob Rose Levine. At the end of the decade Jimmy tried the same concept in the hotel, booking entertainers with gay appeal, like Wayland Flowers (whose puppet, Madame, was said to be based on a Grove woman, and who later became nationally famous on television) and female impersonator Lynne Carter. Levine remembered a crowd of five hundred people one weekend that included two visitors from the Pines: the owner of the gay male Continental Baths in New York City and his houseguest, a young singer named Bette Midler who had developed a loyal gay following performing at the Baths.

Just as the Madison line dance had been invented by Grovers so that gay people could dance with each other, Jimmy Merry collaborated with the Grove in inventing “high tea.” Jimmy took the British concept of high tea and made it both camp-classy and distinctively gay by having tea served by “celebrities” in formal gowns—at first Teri and Suzy, later Grove queens Dick Addison, Rose Levine, and others. Jimmy rented an entire silver tea service with a big tilting samovar, Stephan Cole recalled. He had a long table, the samovar bar, for making the tea and for the cups and saucers and cream and sugar, etc. And he had great trays of food which were sent over from the Sea Shack. At a certain time of day you could see waiters all trailing over with the food, and people used to come and have tea and gulp down the food instead of dinner. During the later 1960s Jimmy made high tea even more attractive by including dancing, and the gay tea dance was born. The profits were not generated by the free tea and the sandwich squares, but from the fact that, as Lyn Hutton said, “we drank like fishes.” Despite the notoriety that tea dance (minus high tea served by a “celebrity”) gained in the Pines, narrators were emphatic and certain that it was invented by Jimmy Merry in the Grove, after which it was copied by John Whyte in the Pines, and subsequently became a gay American institution.

Jimmy Merry was the most influential gay businessman in the history of Cherry Grove, and possibly when the story is told, of New York City, too, where he managed many bars. He opened the way for gay businesses in the Grove. Two people who got their start working for him, Johnny Poole and Lois Mac, ran Grove bars into the late 1980s. Lyn Hutton and Amelia Migliaccio, the owners of the Top of the Bay, one of the two largest Grove restaurants in the 1980s, admired his business methods. In the Grove roman à clef Mr. Ladybug, Becky Crocker satirizes the commercials’ viewpoint. When asked why he is so eager to increase the number of tourists, hotelier Irving I. Irving (based on John Eberhardt) replies, “Slap Happy (based on Jimmy Merry) has food and drink to sell. I have houses to rent. We need to increase our market. We do this via the tourists, many of whom, after repeated visits, become addicted to the place and move here themselves.” Winding up with a rhetorical flourish, Crocker has Irving link the commercial development of Cherry Grove with the fulfillment of what conservatives saw as a twisted version of the American dream, culminating in the absurd negation of Cherry Grove’s raison d’être as an escape from Manhattan: “The whole thing is so American. It’s growth, the most American commodity of all. Anything that stays as is, that fails to grow, is doomed not to stay as it is, and to regress. Ten years from now Holly Hill (Cherry Grove) will be a booming resort, blossoming into another Atlantic City. Twenty years from now, it will have extended its borders to meet the extended borders of the communities to the east and west. . . . Thirty years from now, if all goes well, we may expect the length of the place to be paved. The ultimate fulfillment, per Manhattan Island, the apogee of human culture to date . . .”

In 1978 Jimmy Merry expanded on the Ice Palace name by opening in New York City. It was located at 57 West 57th Street (and 6th Ave.), and was downstairs one flight at this location. It was perhaps most well known for its “Tea Dances” every Sunday afternoon. Long lines of people would often be seen in every season forming queues on W. 57th St. moving East towards 5th Ave. waiting to gain entry into the fabled nightspot. Opened in 1977-1985. When Jimmy Merry opened the Ice Palace in NYC, Roy Thode opened the club and was the headlining DJ. He played there regularly becoming the featured DJ for the ever-popular Sunday Tea Dance during Fall, Winter & Spring months. Summers he always returned to Fire Island for his residency at the Ice Palace in the Grove.


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