Jekyll & Hyde Club

At the Jekyll & Hyde Club there were fake corpses strewn here and there, and the restrooms hid behind trick walls made to look like bookshelves¹. The theme was a 1930s British explorers' club dressed up in Gothic horror, with Victorian decorations, set pieces and actors who roamed the place entertaining the customers¹. When the New York Times's Frank Bruni visited around 2006, the place was packed¹. We called it restaurant as theme park back then, which was the whole idea.

The first one opened in 1991 at 91 Seventh Avenue South in Greenwich Village¹. The Sixth Avenue club, between 57th and 58th streets, was much larger, filling all 12,250 square feet of its building, and by 2011 it was the group's flagship^{1, 2, 3}.

It closed around the turn of 2012, and the group moved its flagship to more than 23,000 square feet on two floors of the old New York Times building at 216 West 44th Street^{1, 2}. In 2014 the developer Ron Domb of the Empire Hotel Group filed permits to turn the Sixth Avenue site into offices, and the facade, which stood long after the club closed, was demolished in 2015^{1, 2}. The chain's last remaining restaurant closed in June 2022¹.