Pussycat Lounge

Our old listing called the Pussycat Lounge sleazy in the best possible way, a strip club that drew as many women as men and booked rock bands. The building had a head start: before the Pussycat it had been a restaurant and a brothel¹. A Wall Street financier, Augustus Hicks Lawrence, built the four-story brick row building in 1799¹.

Gothamist dated the dive to 1969². Taavo Somer and Carlos Quirarte threw parties at the Pussycat before Somer went on to open Freemans and Quirarte The Smile³. At one point it was cool enough to turn up in a Times trend piece about the death of the trucker hat³. The hat didn't make it, and the Pussycat nearly didn't either.

Hotel developer Sam Chang bought the building for $3.5 million while the lounge's owner was trying to get it landmarked¹. When Chang nearly razed it in 2007, the Pussycat was often eulogized as a stubborn survivor of the Giuliani days³. He threatened to demolish it, then abruptly sold it to the lounge's owner at a $1 million loss¹.

The building proved less stubborn. In the fall of 2010 the city shut the Pussycat down, declaring 96 Greenwich Street unsafe to occupy⁴. Before the building began deteriorating, owner Robert Kremer had hoped to open a steak house called The Hamilton Room above the lounge⁴. In January 2011 he told New York magazine he planned to repair the building but wasn't sure he would reopen, because business had dropped since 9/11⁴. He also applied to renew his liquor license, telling the state he would reopen once he'd fixed up the building⁴.

In January 2017 Community Board 1's agenda carried an application to renew the adult-entertainment liquor license for The Pussycat Lounge Inc.⁵. The Pussycat softly reopened on Cinco de Mayo as the Pcat Lounge, keeping a remarkably low profile, and the dancers behind the bar were to return once the adult entertainment license was in order³. Today 96 Greenwich Street is Cat Lounge NY, open until 4 in the morning Thursday through Saturday and billing itself as "FiDi's living room with nine lives"⁶. For this building, nine may be conservative.