The Honor of Co-named Streets

Wes Joice Corner 

People have been honored here in New York with co-naming of streets or places for them.
Look for the special green signs below the other street signs and check outnycstreets.info/honorstreet

Located at the corner of Seventh Avenue and Christopher Street, Wes Joice Corner honors the long-time proprietor of The Lion’s Head at 59 Christopher Street nearby.

John Wesley “Wes” Joice (1931-1997) was the proprietor of The Lion’s Head which he moved from Hudson Street to 59 Christopher Street in 1966. During the 30 years that followed, The Lion’s Head became famous as a gathering place for literary types and a Greenwich Village landmark. It closed in 1996 due to bankruptcy, but in 1998 it became the new home of Kettle of Fish Bar, another long-running bar in the Village, since 1957. 

Joice was born in the Bronx but raised in Chicago, the son of the Chairman of the Chicago Board of Trade. Returning to the Bronx for high school, he would spend one year at Fordham University, three years in the Army in Korea, and two years with the New York Police Department.

Interviewed by Dylan Foley, January 2009, in The Last Bohemians (a blog), Joice speaks of the Lion’s Head. “It was open from 1966 to 1996 and was patronized by such famous New York journalists as Pete Hamill, Dennis Duggan and Jimmy Breslin. The bar witnessed the Stonewall Riots in 1969 and was a headquarters of Norman Mailer’s second mayoral bid with Breslin. The bar was famous for its Jewish drunks, Irish lovers and Italian intellectuals. The physical bar later became the Kettle of Fish, the old bohemian bar which moved from another part of the Village. It is now patronized by NYU students.”

Al Koblin, night bartender and former owner of the Lion’s Head, 1966 to 1984, said

The Lion’s Head moved to 59 Christopher Street in 1966; this location is now, and since 1998, the Kettle of Fish Bar. Photos by Brian J. Pape, AIA.

[The Lion’s Head] “started on Hudson Street. It was owned by Leon Seidel. He took on Wes Joice as a partner. Leon died. Wes was not a good businessman. He had substance-abuse problems that were very expensive. Finally, the place was going to get shut down by the IRS or the state tax police, or something like that. I started at the Lion’s Head as a bartender for six years, I became Wes’ half partner, then managing partner for 13 years. The Village Independent Democrats were cheap…14 people sitting around and all of them wanting a separate check; they were a waitress’ nightmare. Next door to the Lion’s Head was The 55. The 55 was truly like something from Shanghai in the 1920s. They had one or two deaths there of methadone overdoses. The 55 was the lower depths. It was the counterpoint to the Lion’s Head, which was a genteel, middle-class, mostly white place.”

Pete Hamill, a writer at the New York Post in the mid-1960s, recalled the energy and excitement there in his wonderful 1994 memoir, A Drinking Life. “I don’t think many New York bars ever had such a glorious mixture of newspapermen, painters, musicians, seamen, ex-communists, priests and nuns, athletes, stockbrokers, politicians, and folksingers, bound together in the leveling democracy of drink”  and a pre-fame Jessica Lange, who waited tables.