If you expect Alexander’s Lounge—the longstanding gentlemen’s club in North Tonawanda that announced its closure this week—to have a colorful history, you will not be disappointed.
In fact, the wild times here stretch back some 160 years, connecting directly to the Tonawandas’ notorious red-light district, “Goose Island.” Join me as I strip away the years from this Manhattan Street landmark and lay bare its tantalizing past. Tips optional.
The White Star Hotel (c.1882)
For about seventy years, 46 Sweeney Street is operated (with a few small gaps) as the White Star Hotel, with a basement, saloon, and two floors of rooms for rent. It is tucked behind the imposing gothic State Bank on Webster Street, seated lower as the ground slopes toward the canalized Tonawanda Creek and the Little (Niagara) River. The world-class lumber industry booms literally just outside its doors: west of Manhattan Street almost every available inch of land is crammed with great square piles of the valuable commodity, ready for shipment to the cities of the east along the Erie Canal. Men from canal boats, docks, tugs and sailing vessels find rooms and drinks happily proffered at the White Star according to their means.
Their host is himself a fellow navigator of the waters. Captain James Ennis begins leasing the White Star hotel and saloon about 1882 before buying it outright in 1890. Ennis also operates the ancient Log Cabin Hotel out on the cinder-covered River Road at the foot of the Buffalo-Niagara trolley. A visiting “wheelman” (bicyclist) in 1897 describes Ennis thus:
He was a genial, hearty, whole-souled man, still rugged and sunned—a
rough diamond, all the better, perhaps, for not being too highly polished, with a good deal of originality and humor. He had a history as well as the house—you could see it In his face.”Tonawanda News. October 8, 1897.
Captain Ennis’s hotel and saloon cater to sailors, “small opera troops,” and traveling men of all sorts. Two tragedies near the property are recorded in 1889. Ennis’s nephew, a sailor, fires a pistol at his sixteen year-old wife, striking her in the arm before turning the pistol on himself. She survives the attack, but he dies a few weeks later (the story is a sensation in the newspapers beyond North Tonawanda, and is closely followed). Another sailor, Frank Hennon, dies at the White Star “from an injury resulting from a falling wall” (which is SUCH a Nineteenth Century way to die). Ennis’s wife takes out an ad in a Farmer’s Village, N.Y. newspaper, where the sailor said he originated, in hopes of notifying loved ones.
Around 1893 extensive renovations are made. Ennis looks to sell the business, lock, stock and barrel. It will shortly come into the possession of eccentric local inventor and Goose Island house-of-ill-repute-runner, Phillip Perew.
Perew’s White Star Hotel
Canadian-born Phillip Perew takes ownership of the White Star around 1907, and makes it his primary residence. A “traveler, inventor, storyteller and philosopher,” the diminuitive Perew also owns the Perew Hotel out at Two Mile Creek in Tonawanda, and (with his son) about a dozen properties on the so-called “Goose Island,” a notorious strip of land between the canal and the river in Tonawanda frequented by canawlers and locals looking for drink and female accompaniment (today, it is the Riverwalk condominium development).
Phil was a short, slight man,
William Wilbur, Tonawanda News reporter.
but he walked the streets like a
king, and his word was law.
Just two years into Perew’s ownership of the White Star, on September 11, 1909, a disastrous fire starts on an upper floor and ravages the hotel, leaving it “almost totally destroyed.” “Inmates” in “scanty attire” are forced into the street with whatever possessions they can clutch in the chaos. An hour after the conflagration starts, Thomas Shaughnessy, a barkeeper at the Perew Hotel in Tonawanda, arrives at the scene and undertakes a rescue of some of the hotel’s more unusual boarders: exotic animals belonging to Perew.
Without waiting to count the chances, [Shaughnessy] plunged into the smoke and flame filled building and waded up to his waist in water to the cages occupied by a monkey and a Belgian hare, both of which he carried safely to the outside. The wildcat and the Russian wolf had been removed to another place some weeks ago.
Buffalo Courier, September 12, 1909.
The menagerie is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the White Star owner’s larger-than-life life. By his telling, he has visited most of the countries of the world, sold merry-go-rounds in 22 of them, and operated a theatre on Niagara Street in Tonawanda. He spent the previous decade patenting and marketing a giant, walking and talking wooden robot in the likeness of a human, drawing national attention. He patents inventions intended to (alternately) aid aerial navigation, walk on water, propel canal boats via electricity, and improve torpedoes, to name a few. He shows off his many interesting carvings and models in his rooms at the White Star, and in 1921 completes a series of life-size mechanical carvings depicting, of all things, the Biblical life of Christ. He takes this “Holyland” exhibit down the barge canal on a boat named “Philip Perew,” no doubt promoting—if not humility in particular—then virtue in general, and soliciting admission fees all the way.
Perew brings his programming talents to the White Star, featuring “Spanish dancing girls.” A later article describes a Perew production the future patrons of Alexander’s Lounge might recognize:
At one time in the early twenties Phil ran concert halls, where the customers sat around sipping drinks at tables, and the artists performed on a raised stage. The concert halls roused much resentment among the church-minded folks of the Tonawandas.
“Perew proved to be colorful character,” Tonawanda News. September 20, 1980.
Philip Perew lives at the White Star Hotel until death concludes his storied life in 1946. By then he has sold the property, and it is left for others to steer the hotel’s fortunes.
Dorothy Saunders’s White Star Hotel
In December 1938 the White Star Hotel is open under new management, with one Dorothy Saunders the new proprietor. Its advertising promises a good time, vowing “You’ll Have a High Old Time at Dorothy Saunders White Star Hotel. Good food. Good drinks. Good fun.”
Whatever fun was at the saloon may not have been shared by the hotel’s guests. By May of 1951 the old, rat-infested building is condemned as “unfit for human habitation,” and the remaining lodgers are evicted. Much is made of the poor children of the two families in the “basement apartments” who are liberated from the squalor and (in one case) shuttled to Lockport.
Silver Sails Restaurant (1952-1966)
The Saunders family wastes no time in turning the business around. A large investment is made in a shiny new restaurant in the basement, and the “Silver Sail Restaurant” is up and running. I am assured by a descendant that no monkey business is happening at 46 Sweeney in this era. The photo above of John Saunders standing in front of a “No Dancing” sign at the bar seems to support this claim.
Alexander’s Lounge and the Vergos brothers
Wild times return to the old Manhattan Street haunt with the arrival of owners Alex and Peter Vergos. A 1967 ad announces “Something New has Been Added to the Twin Cities!” By 1974 “Alexander’s Lounge” clearly has more than Texas Red Hots on the menu, as “Go-Go Girls” are openly advertised in the Tonawanda News.
In 1979 another disastrous fire strikes the three-story building. Eight people are living in the rooms above the lounge at the time, and while all survive, they are displaced by the destruction of the upper two floors.
What’s your Alexander’s story?
For almost 60 years, Alexander’s Lounge has been a rite of passage for generations of Tonawandans. Share your best Alexander’s story below!
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