Walking down East 5th Street, right off First Avenue, you will see an iron stoop topped with a graffiti-decorated sign that reads “Kraine Theater” in bold, hand-painted letters. If the neon lights are on, you can walk up the stairs through the grand red doors, take another set of stairs up to the second floor and turn the corner on the right to enter a dimly lit bar with red walls and Soviet-themed decor. A bust of Lenin sits in the corner by the window, hammer-and-sickle flags hang on the walls along Stalinist woodcuts. The seats are full of chatty people of all ages and genders, and a single bartender takes orders at a decently crowded bar.
The poets will sit in their respective corners facing their friends who tell them not to be nervous, that they’ve already published their book, and this is just a reading. They smile nervously, especially the younger ones. More patrons walk in and order their first drink of the night and the host begins to introduce the readers, prompting applause and then silence as the first writer moves towards the makeshift podium.
It is in this way that the 27th season of Monday Night Poetry began, as it had in the 26 years prior, bringing together both newcomers and New Yorkers who have called the place their literary home for decades.
The Kraine Gallery Bar (aka KGB) and its accompanying third floor bar “Red Room” sit atop the Kraine Theater, making the whole building an East Village cultural mainstay. It’s a buzzing place to be almost every day of the week, and while the establishment and the surrounding neighborhood has had its ups and downs, it has been this way for nearly a century.
In a New York Times story about the bar and the now famous literary scene it hosts, the reporter quotes a source saying “If downtown is the city's hothouse of literary fiction, ''K.G.B. is at the heart of what's going on right now.'' But what make it this way? What does it mean for a place to be a cultural hotspot? How is one created?
The building first began its life as a bar during prohibition. It was the site of an illegal speakeasy called the Palm Casino, run by the famous five-points gang mobster Lucky Luciano, current owner Denis Woychuk told the New York Times.
During the bar’s next life, Woychuk himself was around and had his first drink with his father there. From 1948-1988, the building was occupied by the Ukrainian-American League, a Communist and Socialists club frequented by Soviet emigrés and members of the Socialist Party of America. Under the club’s ownership, the third floor bar was also used as a meeting place for the activist Emma Goldman to hold her anarchist social group discussions.
Woychuk worked for the Club and was eventually offered an option to buy the building, which he did in 1983, and upon purchasing he opened his first business venture, the Kraine Art Gallery, on the first floor. A lover of theater, he also opened the space up as a theater in the evening.
In 1993, he officially opened the KGB Bar on the second floor and began to host literary events. These included fiction nights, which became popular sites for publishers to scout talent, and of course, the Monday night poetry readings.