|
Author gives voice
to historic tavern's colorful clientele
 Sunday,
March 28, 2004
By ELAINE D'AURIZIO
STAFF WRITER
The first time
Matt Connor walked into the place, he thought it was the dumpiest bar
he had ever been in.
"People would
say, 'Yeah, but it's our bar,'" Connor said. He came to
understand that affection felt by blue-collar neighborhood faithfuls
- miners, garage mechanics, truck drivers, the unemployed - who
frequented the place. The year was 1992 and the small bar in Mine
Hill, Morris County, was then called Maddie's Mine Hill Tavern.
Originally a hotel
and bar for stagecoach drivers in the 1860s, it later catered to
poor, illiterate iron miners, accused murderers, lion tamers, and
drag queens. Most fascinating to Connor, was the place's lack of
pretense and its transformation to one of the state's first gay bars
after the mines closed in 1966. The gay movement was being born on
the other side of the Hudson River after rioting followed the raiding
of a gay bar in Manhattan.
"The world
was changing and a tiny little town in New Jersey was changing,
too," said Connor. "From the 1960s to 1990s, there was this
undercover gay bar in a small, blue-collar area of New Jersey that
most people didn't know about."
Connor, who is
openly gay, thought the tavern was revolutionary for its time. He
decided to write about its unlikely transformation and the colorful
characters - gays and heterosexuals - who formed a community there.
The result is a 240-page book, "Watering Hole: The Colorful
History of Booze, Sex, and Death at a New Jersey Tavern."
"I felt if I
put it down on paper, if I told the story, it wouldn't be lost,"
said Connor, 38. "I'd be able to keep the tavern of that time alive."
Although the title
sounds decadent,
it omits the
affection Connor felt for the bar's owner, Madeline "Maddie"
Bellini, whose funeral he attended. Or the admiration he felt for
gays who courageously frequented the bar at a time when gays were
closeted and homosexuality was a taboo topic.
"It was just
a simple, very comfortable place where people could let their hair
down," Connor said. "There were so few places where gays
could go and it was very freeing for the people who went there. They
were outcasts who found a home there. Other places in the cities were
'meat markets' but not Maddie's. The young mingled with the old there."
He remembers
Bellini, who died in a car crash in 1995 only months after selling
the tavern, as very warm-hearted and compassionate with customers.
"She was a
really neat lady," Connor said. "She knew the names of
customers who hadn't been in for years. She knew many of her patrons
were alienated from their families and cooked Christmas and
Thanksgiving dinner for them so they had a place to go."
Bellini owned the
bar with her alcoholic husband, Frank, but later switched her
affections to barmaid Maureen Kavanaugh, who moved into the rooms
above the bar with her. When local lesbians realized two of their own
were operating the bar, they stopped by. By 1970, the bar was almost
exclusively gay. It attracted a lot of offbeat characters. "You
never knew what you were going to find when you went there but it was
usually a good time that's for sure," a former patron told Connor.
Connor, a
nationally known expert on Indian casinos, talked to dozens of former patrons.
"A lot were
simple, blue-collar people with a lot to risk just being there,"
Connor said of the clientele. "They had an everyday type of
courage, to come out before I [started going to the bar].
He researched
newspaper clippings and pored over deeds and legal papers, tracing
the tavern's history to its origins in 1868 as the Cox Hotel, to a
World War II serviceman's bar where, Connor said, "mini-dramas
went on that were so interesting to me."
The more he read
and interviewed people, the more he wanted to know.
"The human
stories connected to this were one of the things that kept me going,
kept me fascinated," he said. "You can't help but feel, 'If
these walls could speak what would they say?'"
So Connor, senior
editor of the casino industry trade magazine IGWB, speaks for them.
And the results are gripping as the colorful characters struggle
through their difficult, often touching, lives.
There's Mary Anne
Moore. A miner's wife, she was beaten to death and her body
discovered near the Cox Hotel Tavern in 1872. Her husband was found
guilty of the murder but blamed another miner who had been drinking
at the tavern that night. And Wally Lutz, a circus employee who once
brought a 600-pound Siberian tiger to the tavern. And Hazel, a robust
character with "a red rummy nose from years of hard drinking who
had a bawdy sense of humor and a way with a song."
Connor has a way
of making tavern regulars come alive as he connects them to local
history. Then again, Connor is hardly new to writing. Besides being
editor of IGWB, he is editor in chief of the Native American casino
trade magazine Indian Gaming Business, was managing editor of the
men's fashion magazine MR, and has written for Forbes FYI, Men's
Style, and other publications.
But this is his
first book. In researching it, Connor discovered something important
as he read dusty documents.
"One thing I
realized is that, once you leave this existence, you leave very
little behind," he said. "There was nothing in the
documents that would tell you what they were like when they were
alive. Except for some dope like me who goes searching for you, it's
as if you were never alive. That's a difficult thing to accept."
Maddie sold the
tavern in 1994 and it was turned into the Cornelius House restaurant.
Last month, it opened as The Grill. As it was being renovated in
1994, Connor and his companion, Randy Sonner, passed by. A deep sense
of loss swept over them and Connor began to realize how special the
place was to them.
"I wished I
could do more to bring these people alive," Connor said.
"You want to think you've left your little thumbprint in your
corner of the world."
One thing many
customers left was their names scrawled in chalk on the ceiling of
Maddie's tavern. It became a tradition and the number of names grew
to thousands written over each other.
"A lot of
people died during the 1980s of AIDS," said Connor. "Maybe
all that was left is the chalk."
Maddie often told
a close friend that she wanted to be remembered after she died.
She'd be happy to
know Connor has seen to it that she won't be forgotten.
‘Watering
Hole’ author Matt Connor reads Saturday
By MARY ANNE
CHRISTIANO - Wednesday, March 24, 2004 - The
Montclair Times
“Initially I
was interested in it because it just seemed so odd,” Matt Connor said.
Murder, suicide,
ghosts, drag queens — you’ll read all about it in the
page-turning new book, “Watering Hole: The Colorful History of
Booze, Sex and Death at a New Jersey Tavern,” written by the
award-winning author.
The little country
tavern was originally known as Cox Hotel when it was built in the
suburban neighborhood of Mine Hill in 1868 not far from the
state’s largest iron mine. It was eventually owned by Frank and
Madeline Bellini, catering to iron miners and other blue-collar
workers through the early 1960s. When the last iron mine closed down
in 1966, the tavern could no longer depend on the miners to remain in
business. It was around that time the tavern, now known as Frank and
Maddy’s Mine Hill Tavern, started catering to a gay crowd
featuring performances by drag queens and soon known as the first gay
bar in Morris County.
“I was
familiar with it when it was a gay bar,” Connor said. “It
was a very rural town. You usually find gay bars in New York City,
New Hope, New Brunswick and Atlantic City — more urban places.
It will go down in record as the only gay bar in that setting. How
did the gay bar open up? That’s where my curiosity started.”
Connor spoke to
some of the local historians who said they were always curious about
the building, which today is a restaurant called The Grill. When
Connor started researching the history he got hooked. “I spent
two and a half years trying to find out more and more. It was an
obsession,” he said. “I’m like that, I get curious
about things.”
In the early part
of the book, Mine Hill was a tough town. Connor said, “People
who live in Mine Hill now see it as a tiny suburban area. They
don’t realize that if they could turn back the clock 100 years
their neighborhood was filled with rough neck, hardboiled people who
drank too much and very fairly violent. They had to be that way
because they had such a tough career going down into the iron mines
in Northern Jersey. The odds were great that you wouldn’t get
out of the mines. Mining accidents happened every day.”
Connor thinks
it’s important to know your local history. He said, “It was
a mission to revive some of these people. These people did come and
grow here. They touched people who lived on this earth.”
Currently, Connor
is the senior editor of IGWB, a trade magazine covering the legal
gaming entertainment industry worldwide. “Watering Hole: The
Colorful History of Booze, Sex and Death at a New Jersey Town”
is his first nonfiction book.
====================================================================================
Connor will be
signing copies of his book at watchung booksellers, 54 Fairfield St.,
on Saturday, March
27, from 1 to 2 p.m. For more information go to www.wateringholebook.com.
Reviews by
Linda Linguvic
Watering
Hole by Matt Connor
Some books
tell the story of people. Other books tell the story of a place. But
this book tells the story of both. Subtitled "The Colorful
History of Booze, Sex and Death at a New Jersey Tavern,"
"Watering Hole" is a mere 227 pages long, including about
50 photographs, but it tells a fascinating tale. It's scrupulously
researched too, with newspaper accounts of murders, mayhem and mine
accidents going all the way back to the 1860s, when the Mine Hill
Tavern was a stagecoach stop for weary travelers. The iron mines that
were there then have long since closed, but there were many a pint
poured down the parched throats of the men who labored so hard in
those mines. Most were Irish immigrants, struggling to make ends
meet, many of them drinking too much and too hard and beating their
wives too much. And there's a famous murder case from those days
about one of those beatings that went too far.
The tavern
changed hands through the years, and was often tinged with scandal,
such as the divorced man and the unmarried woman who ran the place in
the 1920s, as well as the story of a seemingly happily married
couple, Frank and Maddie, who bought it in the 1960s. It wasn't long
though till Maddie started a gay relationship with a waitress, Frank
moved out, and the two women continued to run the place as a gay bar
till the late 90s. This in itself made the bar unique. It was 45
miles from New York City, in a small town in New Jersey, and yet it
was a haven for gay people. And, through the years, it witnessed both
the gay rights movement and the devastation of AIDS.
Later, it
became an upscale restaurant, but that was shortly before 9-11, and
the business never did well. At the moment, the place is empty and
waiting for the next chapter of its history to be written.
The book
is totally factual, with much of the material drawn from historical
records and interviews. Throughout, I could sense the author's
delight as he unearthed yet another newspaper account or remembrance
that rounded out the history of the place. To his credit, there is a
clear distinction between fact and myth. And the result is that the
little tavern in Morris Country, New Jersey, comes alive on the page.
"Watering
Hole" is a small slice of life in a small town in a small
state. But the effort and obvious enjoyment that went into the
writing of it is anything but small. Hats off and applause to Matt
Connor for bringing it to life!
Recommended.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
An Amazon.com Top
50 Reviewer, Linda Linguvic is a freelance writer for several web
publications including Intervention and The Greenwich Village
Gazette. In addition, she writes a free daily e-mail column in which
she writes about books, movies, museums, current events, the human
condition, her wonderful home town of New York City and anything else
that happens to interest her.
Author paints
colorful history of former gay bar
 Randolph
Reporter - November 13, 2003
MINE HILL TWP. -
Murder, mayhem and homosexuality figure prominently in a new book
about a former township tavern.
The colorful
history of Maddie's Mine Hill Tavern, formerly on Randolph Avenue, is
the subject of Matt Connor's new book, "Watering Hole: The
Colorful History of Booze, Sex and Death at a New Jersey Tavern,"
published by 1st Books Library.
Connor, 38, said
the book takes a historical look at the place. Some pretty amazing
things happened as the tavern went from owner to owner and name to name.
The tavern is
currently closed down.
"When I
started talking to some of the regulars who used to go to this place,
it was this deep well of affection that I didn't expect to find,"
said Connor.
As Connor
progressed with his work, he began to find affection for the tavern
welling up from within himself, too. While interviewing regulars at
the bar, which became a gay bar in the 1960s, Connor began to
discover that many of the former patrons had collected memorabilia
from the tavern.
They passed some
of the items on to Connor, who still has them.
Narrow Focus
When Connor began
the book, he planned on only looking at the tavern between 1964 and
1994, the 30 years it had been a gay bar. Connor himself is openly
gay, and therefore the topic of a gay bar in a small Morris County
town interested him. However, as he dug deeper and deeper into the
watering hole's history, he became intrigued with what he found.
"The more I
got into it, the hungrier I became for information," said Connor.
Connor said he
kept digging for more information to give him momentum for his search.
He said it
required a high degree of focus to be able to weave together all the
different tales from the tavern to create one cohesive storyline. He
kept stumbling upon bits and pieces of information that created
various intriguing subplots.
One such subplot
was the 1872 murder of Mary Ann Moore, a resident of the Irishtown
section of Mine Hill, so named for the many Irish mine workers who
resided there. Moore died at the hand of her husband, who was
promptly convicted of the crime.
What Connor found
most eyebrow-raising about the incident was that the newspapers
repeatedly alluded to how common it was for Irish immigrants to beat
their wives. Connor found it disturbing that the press would so
negatively depict a population with blanket statements.
Perhaps Connor's
favorite character from the book is Elizabeth Ellis. In 1890, Ellis
was found dead, floating in the Morris Canal.
When Connor set
out to write his book, he knew nothing about Elizabeth Ellis.
As he rooted
through the tavern's history, he found mention of her name. From that
point, Connor said he felt as if Ellis's spirit was urging him to
find out more about her.
He pursued his
instinct, and he learned that differing accounts of Ellis's death had
been presented by different newspapers. One paper said she had
committed suicide; another said her death had been an accident.
Connor presented both sides of the story.
"That was one
person I really felt I got to know," said Connor.
Connor said he had
to walk a fine line to keep the book interesting for all audiences,
and not just gay audiences.
"I didn't
want it to be just a gay book for gay people to read," said
Connor. "I wanted it to be accessible to everyone."
As a result,
Connor kept the sex to a minimum, and didn't go into explicit detail
when he did explore the topic.
"There's a
lot more booze and death in there than sex," said Connor.
Connor tells
stories of both good times and bad, from parties to murders, from
miners to homosexuals. What stands out about the narrative is not
that all of these things happened; it's that they all happened
central to one tiny little tavern in the township of Mine Hill.
Tavern of change
By Abbott Koloff, Daily
Record
- 11/9/03
 MINE
HILL -- Madeline Bellini was known as a generous and gentle woman.
She owned a bar on Randolph Avenue that was busy on weekends, the
crowd spilling into the street. Her favorite piece of clothing, by
all accounts, was a sweatshirt. One of her relatives said this past
week that she did not seem to live a colorful life.
Or so he thought.
In the gay
community, and to her neighbors, Bellini was known as owner of the
first gay bar in Morris County. It was the place where Jim Clarke,
who now runs a gay bar in Boonton, figured out he was not alone. It
was a place where, in the mid-1980s, gay people say they went so they
could be part of a community.
The bar now is
closed and Bellini has been dead for eight years. But the building
where the bar was located is about to be reopened as a restaurant.
And a man who was a customer at Maddie's Mine Hill Tavern in the
early 1990s, shortly before it closed, has written a book not only
about the bar, but also about the 135-year-old building in which it
was located.
Matt Connor, who
wrote a self-published book called "Watering Hole,"
searched legal documents, old deeds and newspaper records dating back
to the 1860s. He found accounts of murders loosely connected to the
building. He uncovered coincidences and threads in personal
relationships covering more than a century. His book begins with
reference to a map showing a building on a farm in 1868, the location
of the Mine Hill Tavern, on what might have been a stagecoach route.
It ends with
Maddie Bellini selling her bar in 1994, moving to Florida and dying
in a 1995 car crash. The bar later became a restaurant called the
Cornelius House, which closed a year ago. Now, a Jefferson resident,
Rick Riccardi, says he has a contract to purchase the building and
expects to open a steakhouse there, perhaps before the end of the
year. He said he plans to renovate the building, removing aluminum
siding that replaced the original plank walls.
Connor, writes
that Bellini had a long-term relationship with a woman who lived with
her above the bar, but he also says she never acknowledged the
relationship as anything more than a friendship. Bellini, he said,
told several stories to explain how her bar became a gathering place
for the gay community. None of them involved her sexual identity.
Bellini's nephew,
Ed Rochford, now the Morris County Sheriff, visited the bar with his
wife around Christmas in 1985. He said he always visited his aunt at
that time of year and the bar usually was empty. This time, he said,
he had to push his way through a crowd. He was talking to his aunt
when a man, someone he knew from high school, turned to him.
"Hey, Ed, how
are you doing?" the man said. "I never thought I'd see YOU here."
Rochford had no
idea what the man meant. Then he noticed women dancing with women.
That's when his aunt told him how her tavern became a gay bar. She
said members of the Gay Activist Alliance of Morris County stopped by
one night after a meeting. They asked Bellini if she minded them
dancing. When she said no, they became regulars.
"Maddie told
different stories to everybody," Rochford said this past week.
"That was the story I got. &ldots; I always thought of her as
quiet, unassuming Aunt Maddie. She was more colorful than I thought
she was."
Bellini told her
nephew that her bar had fallen on hard times. It had been a place
where miners used to come for a shot and a beer. Then, when the last
iron ore mine closed in 1966, there were no more miners. Connor says
that Bellini, who bought the bar in 1961, had to find another niche.
Personal stories
In his book,
Connor connects what happened at the bar to events in the surrounding
community. Not just the story of a gay bar, his book reveals
something about the history of Mine Hill as told in personal stories.
Albert
"Abbie" Ebner, 78, says he was born in Mine Hill and was 15
years old, and not allowed to drink, when he first stepped inside the
tavern, which then was owned by a man named Art Glass. One of Ebner's
brothers, Harold, cut wood for the pot-bellied stove that warmed the
tavern. Afterward, Ebner said, Harold spent whatever money he earned
on drinks in the bar.
"It was a
pretty good deal for Art," Ebner said last week. "He was
making it from both ends."
His brother went
into the Army in 1942 and Ebner said Art Glass threw a going-away
party for him. Once, when Harold came home on furlough, he was having
so much fun at the bar that he didn't bother to catch the bus back to
his Tennessee Army base. Ebner begged his brother to go back and,
after a lot of talk, and even more beer, he relented. His brother
later fought in Europe and became a highly-decorated soldier, Ebner said.
Helen Turpack, 81,
came to Mine Hill in 1939 and lived for a time with brothers who
worked in the mines. The Mine Hill Tavern was known at the time, she
said, as Art Glass' Green Room because the outside was painted dark
green. Turpack remembers a jukebox that played polkas and Big Band
music. She and Ebner also remember a man named Nick Hryor, known as
"Greasy Nick" because he ran an auto repair shop, who
walked with a limp but put on a show at the bar with his dancing.
"He was
always dressed in suspenders and looked like he'd just come out from
under a car," Ebner said.
Turpack used to
dance at the bar with her husband, Joe, who died in 1988 and lost a
part of his left foot in the 1940s while working in the mines.
Turpack said her husband drilled into a hole where someone had left
unexploded dynamite. The resulting explosion kept her husband out of
the war, Turpack said, and he continued working for the Alan Wood
Steel Co. until it left town in 1966. He later became a maintenance
worker at Parsippany Hills High School.
The other day, as
Ebner walked near Jackson Brook, not far from the Mine Hill Tavern,
he talked about a childhood memory of a woman known as Big Mary who
used to bathe naked in the brook while holding a poodle. He said a
lot of people used to bathe in the brook because few houses,
including his, had indoor plumbing. Big Mary, he said, worked at the
bar in the 1930s.
Not far from that
spot, Ebner said, was a site where the body of a murdered woman named
Mary Ann Moore was found on Nov. 29, 1872.
Connor found
details of the murder in local newspaper accounts. In his book, he
wrote that Mary Ann Moor's husband, David, was found guilty of
murder. Another suspect, Thomas Madden, had been drinking at a bar
called the Cox Hotel on the day the body was found. That bar later
would be owned by Maddie Bellini.
David Moore had
caught Madden with his wife the previous day and the two men fought,
according to Connor. Then, for reasons that remain a mystery, they
sat down and had a few drinks together. David Moore testified that he
went out to purchase more liquor and came home to find his wife
beaten and badly injured. He took her to the brook to wash her off
but dropped her a few times, her head one time hitting a jagged rock.
At least that was
David Moore's story, according to Connor.
A jury found Moore
guilty of murdering his wife. Madden died in a mine accident 10 years
later while substituting for another worker -- a man who later opened
a bar down the street from the Mine Hill Tavern, a bar now known as Joann's.
Bar advice
Joann Canfield,
owner of that bar, said last week that Maddie Bellini became a friend
who used to give her tips on running a bar. Bellini often came to
Canfield's bar and restaurant for shrimp cocktail and a glass of
wine. Some people told Canfield that she shouldn't be friendly to Bellini.
"They said
she owns a lesbian bar," Canfield said last week. "I said:
'Don't worry, I'm not a lesbian.'"
Bellini and her
husband, Frank, had purchased the Mine Hill Tavern in 1961 and there
is some dispute about when it became a gay bar. Bellini was separated
from her husband and living with a female bartender above the bar by
the mid-1960s. Rochford said his aunt told him that she turned her
tavern into a gay bar in the mid-1980s because it was good for business.
Connor wrote in
his book that Bellini's tavern was a gay bar by the late 1960s, just
as a gay activism movement began. He wrote that Mine Hill police
officers, decades ago, allegedly harassed customers coming out of the
bar. He also wrote that teenagers had been known to throw eggs at the
building. But while Ebner and Turpack said they never went into the
bar after it became a gay bar, they also said they didn't care about
its transformation.
"I never did
any survey, but I don't think people were upset about it," Ebner
said. "I don't know of anyone who ever talked about it."
There was a period
in the late 1960s, Ebner said, when working-class people went to the
bar during the day and it became a mostly gay bar at night. The
change had something to do with the economy of a town that once
depended on mining iron ore and was becoming more and more suburban.
By 1985, when Jim Clarke first went to the bar, he said it was one of
the few places around where gay people could gather and feel comfortable.
"It was an
eye-opener," said Clarke, who along with a partner now runs
Connections, a gay bar in Boonton, "I didn't know that there was
such a thing as gay life in New Jersey."
Maddie Bellini was
addicted to playing the lottery, he said, and everything stopped when
lottery winners were announced on TV. One of the big events each week
was to gather at the bar and watch the TV show "Dynasty."
One of the traditions, apparently begun long before Bellini owned the
bar, was for patrons to write their names in chalk on the ceiling.
Those names now are hidden under a slab of Sheet rock, Connor said,
waiting to be uncovered. |
