Peter Rabbit (New York City Gay Bar/1972-1988)

Peter Rabbit — New York City Vintage Gay Bar Tee

Located at 306 West 10th Street in Greenwich Village, Peter Rabbit was part of New York City's legendary gay nightlife scene during the 1970s and 1980s, when the streets surrounding Christopher Street and the Hudson River waterfront were among the most exciting, notorious, and unapologetically gay places in America.

And despite its rather innocent-sounding name, Peter Rabbit belonged to a neighborhood that was anything but innocent.

This was the era of tight Levi's, leather jackets, work boots, mustaches, and disco, when gay men flocked to the West Village to drink, dance, cruise, and enjoy freedoms that were still difficult to find elsewhere.

The surrounding neighborhood was packed with gay bars, leather hangouts, and after-hours gathering places. Nearby establishments like Ramrod, Sneakers, and Badlands helped establish the Christopher Street waterfront as one of the great centers of gay male culture.

And what made these places special wasn't necessarily fancy decor or celebrity DJs. It was the atmosphere. A crowded bar, a jukebox, familiar faces, and the possibility of meeting someone who might make the evening considerably more interesting.

But the Village was also changing. The AIDS crisis devastated New York's gay community throughout the 1980s, while redevelopment gradually transformed the gritty waterfront into something almost unrecognizable. Many of the neighborhood's original gay establishments disappeared, taking decades of stories and memories with them.

Peter Rabbit belongs to that increasingly vanished world of old-school Greenwich Village gay bars, when the neighborhood was less polished, considerably more adventurous, and still very much a place where queer New Yorkers made their own rules.