A Hangout Crippled by the Red Scare Was Reborn As a Communist-Themed Bar
Denis Woychuk, 68, owns the KGB Bar.
KGB was once the Ukrainian Labor Home. I was probably in this bar in diapers. Had my first drink here at 5. My father had come from Ukraine at 18 or 19. He was a peasant, growing up when his country was a marching grounds: World War I, the Russian Revolution, the pogroms. He was starving, orphaned, although he later found his father. He got out and became a merchant seaman and ended up coming to America. He liked to come to the Ukrainian Labor Home because even though he didn’t talk much, at least he could understand the language. We used to come and watch the propaganda films, like, “Look at our new tractors. Yeah, this tractor does the work of 20 mules.” They had 5,000 members and a newspaper, the Ukrainian Daily News. But when the Red Scare came and McCarthy got his panties all in a bunch, the place started hemorrhaging
members because they’re like, Hey, you know, we’re here for the American Dream. We’re not here to be blacklisted. My father got blacklisted. He was working on the shipyard in Baltimore as a welder.
And suddenly it was, “He was born in Ukraine”—part of the Soviet Union. He began working minimum-wage jobs in Brooklyn. Sweatshops. The FBI would come around and say to his boss, “If he’s working here in two weeks, we’re gonna look at your books.” So he’d get fired. It was intense. He was angry. I didn’t know any of this political stuff till I was, like, a late teen. He was just mean to everyone.
I started to come to this building again when I was in my mid-20s. I was an adjunct professor at Pratt, paying my way through law school at night. They remembered me here. Nice little old lady ran the kitchen, and they had a small canteen dining room in the bar—$5 for meat loaf, potatoes, varenyky, soup, salad, and a drink. So I got this idea to throw parties here Friday nights for artists. It was cheap. The artists loved it. The old Ukrainians loved it. It was the early ’80s. I started an art gallery on the first floor, Kraine Gallery, dropped the U. I knew nothing about business, but I worked my ass off for several years.
Then the Ukrainians were aging out and I said, “Okay, I’ll run this, but I gotta have the building.” By then I had the Kraine Gallery and I was running the bar, so I went with the whole secrecy, speakeasy, anarchist, workers-unite vibe of the history of the building and called it KGB—Kraine Gallery Bar—and put up memorabilia they’d stashed away. Made it a postcommunist Communist-themed bar. Then the old people were afraid to come. And the Russians wouldn’t come. But their kids would.
One night in 1994, the author Frank Browning was going to read at the bar on a Sunday, free, and someone from the Times came and reported that we were starting a reading series. Everybody read here. All the Jonathans: Franzen, Safran Foer, Ames. My favorite was David Foster Wallace. Who had the best reading series? It was between us and the 92nd Street Y, and George Plimpton picked us.