The Lion
62 West Ninth Street
New York, NY
June/July 1960
Above: Exterior of The Lion, circa 2010.
Many performers got their start in the bohemian community of New York City’s Greenwich Village in the early 1960’s: Bob Dylan, Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Woody Allen, and Joan Rivers. A new musical, The Fantasticks, was also garnering attention at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, a small off-Broadway theater in The Village.
The Lion, located in The Village at West Ninth Street, was predominantly a gay bar, located on the ground floor of a typical New York brownstone. On Monday nights they had a talent contest.
(Above: Streisand drinks coffee; possibly taken at the Pam Pam on Sixth Avenue, a burger joint that Streisand would frequent with Schulenberg and Dennen.)
Streisand's friend, Barry Dennen, lived in an apartment at 69 West 9th Street—right across the street from The Lion. According to Barry Dennen, The Lion had a back room “where there was a little area that acted as a kind of stage, with the piano backed up at one end and the audience sitting at tables all around it.”
Dennen, knowing how talented she was, conviced Streisand to enter the talent contest.
Barbra auditioned in the first place because she was “out of money and out of work,” she recalled. “And then I entered this talent contest in a bar in Greenwich Village. Not as an actress though. As a singer— even though I’d never had a lesson.”
“My unemployment insurance was up and though I’d never sung anyplace or done anything, I decided to try,” Streisand stated.
“When I started to sing, I thought it was nothing. I wanted to be playing Shakespeare, Chekhov; what was I doing in a night club? I was making a living, I was making enough to eat.”
Barbra sang “A Sleepin’ Bee” that first night and wowed the audience. She won the prize, changed her name from Barbara to Barbra, and sang for a few weeks at the Lion. As Barbra said during her Timeless concerts in 2000, she was “making fifty dollars a week and all the London Broil I could eat.”
The owner of The Lion, Burke McHugh, told writer Randall Riese that “there was definitely a buzz about Barbra. It started that first night at the Lion. A lot of agents came down to see her. Noel Coward saw her at the Lion.”
Above: The Lion reopened in Spring 2010 under new management.
Bob Schulenberg, a talented illustrator, met Streisand on July 1, 1960. In the 2005 edition of New York Social Diary, he recalled his first meeting with her:
I turned around and there was this very exotic looking creature wearing a kind of lurex-y jacket of red and silver metallic threads and huge Elizabethan sleeves that puffed out, and underneath she had on a mulberry velvet short skirt about an inch and a half above the knee (minis didn’t come in to fashion for about another five years). She was carrying shopping bags stuffed with clothing – feathers, a beautiful lavender feather coat.
“When I won my first talent contest at the Lion,” Streisand said, “I didn’t realize it was a gay bar. Cis [Corman] came opening night after I’d won and I said to her, ‘Why are we the only women here?’ She laughed and told me where we were.”
In 2003, Barbra revealed “Joel Schumacher, the director, said he was a waiter there when I was there.”
With her success at The Lion, Barbra was then able to perform at a bigger club around the corner: The Bon Soir.
(Above) The Village Bar resided at 62 West Ninth Street for years until Spring 2010 when new owners re-opened the space using its original name, The Lion.
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