There Are Ghosts At East Village's KGB

Ghost Stories is a monthly column featuring investigations into the haunted history behind New York's iconic purlieus and up-and-coming hotspots.

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Inside you are two wolves: One is an advice columnist for The Nation and the other is wearing a hand-knit pink pussy hat. As journalist David Kortava observed, both wolves coexist— albeit in a slightly contemptuous political polyphony— at KGB, an East Village watering hole in the wall. Fear not, dear reader, this Soviet-themed literary hotspot is not the fruit of any digital-age champagne socialist’s ruminative ennui. Sorry, I misspelled labor— typewriters, am I right? As I was saying, the story of KGB’s founding— and haunting— embodies the ever-potent dichotomy between subversive interiors and their stolid exteriors.

Long before Denis Woychuk founded KGB Bar in the early ‘90s, the red brick tenement at 85 East 4th Street served as the Ukrainian Labor Home, an aptly named social club for Ukrainian socialists. Woychuk often accompanied his father, a Ukrainian immigrant blacklisted for Socialist sympathies, to weekly gatherings at the club. He spent less and less time at the Labor Home as he grew up, and it was not until he became disenchanted with the sterile path to middle-class comfort he sought through practicing law that he decided to return to the Socialist refuge of his youth.

Woychuk’s yearning for a more creative life serendipitously coincided with the club’s dire need for money— an intimate meeting of desperate minds that birthed the Kraine Gallery, which would occupy what was once the club’s first-floor event hall. Desperation, however, can only take one so far: aging members could no longer run the upstairs bar and the gallery fell victim to the 1987 stock market crash, leaving Woychuk with nothing but an empty second-floor bar.

Woychuk describes his decision to re-establish the bar as being out of his mortal control, explaining that “an empty bar creates a vacuum, and a vacuum wants to be filled”. His plan, however, did not include a desire to reinvent the building’s secretive complexion and subversive politics. In the agitational spirit of its forebears, the name ‘KGB’ itself is a cleverly evasive equivoque. As far as the New York State Department is concerned, the fact that Kraine Gallery Bar and the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti share an identifying acronym is but a sheer coincidence— almost as sheer as the Iron Curtain.

In this sense, the duality of KGB as a sociopolitical institution lies somewhere between the historical preservation and contemporary extension of dissenting ideas. In Woychuk’s personal history of how KGB came to be, he notes that the Ukrainian Labor Home of his youth displayed “no posters of the great Soviet revolution, no photos of the politburo with Breshnev presiding, no propaganda whatsoever visible anywhere,” adding that any propaganda “was hidden away in a double-locked room on the fourth floor because these people had been subject to McCarthy’s feverish persecutions."

Now, mostly unburdened by Red Scare hysteria (see: Florida), Woychuk’s bar both honors and builds upon the radical leftism ingrained in its walls. The barroom’s Agitprop-lined walls feature framed portraits of Soviet leaders and Communist thinkers, which preside over the space with an otherworldly gravitas that engenders deference from even the most neoliberal of patrons.

“If I were a ghost,” I’ve found myself thinking increasingly often, “especially a Communist ghost, I would be overjoyed to come across a brightly lit sign in the middle of Manhattan that openly alluded to Soviet sympathies. I would be cautious, of course, given that this could easily be a trap, but it would bring a singular tear to my eye to see the posters we had to keep in hiding proudly displayed as generations of politically-minded New Yorkers gather to discuss and debate over— could it be? Yes! Vodka!”

Apropos of nothing besides the impalpable power of my specter-senses, the aforementioned tear of redemption shed by the Communist ghost version of myself I just made up landed directly on my notepad. Some less in tune with the supernatural world might mistake this singular ghost tear for a leak given the torrential downpour outside. I, however, am both smarter and considerably more au courant on otherworldly matters than most people. My fellow patrons might read ‘theory’, whatever that means, but I’m the one who brought a yellow legal pad to the bar, so.

An earlier triage led me to a Paris Review blog post from 2016, in which the writer evidently time-traveled to steal my idea and bother the KGB staff about ghosts before I got the chance. I don’t know why this person went to such great lengths to make me look like a fool in front of all my friends, family, and fans here today, but at least they provided a decent starting point for my investigation to build upon. My fellow ghosthunter talked to longtime bar manager Dan Christian, who told them that he sees “dark figures” in the mirror behind the bar, and that he’ll “look into it and see … translucent shadows”. This is an excellent insight for two reasons: first, it proves that there are ghosts at KGB, and (B), anyone who denies the presence of ghosts is lying.

With my specter-senses fully engaged, I started my own interrogation process. I had a gut feeling that the woman making drinks behind the bar probably worked there, so I asked her if she’s seen anything spooky while on the clock. I was almost taken aback by her emphatic confirmation of my suspicions: “I hear them,” she told me, “especially when I’m opening. It’s always when you want to have a quiet night and there are just ghosts going clank clank clank— it’s crazy."

A man in an incredibly dapper fedora suddenly emerged from behind the bar. He told me that he’s seen “a transparent hostess standing around, who I’m sure we didn’t hire in this lifetime." He relayed this enigmatic information in a single breath and breezed past me in a way that told me he has more important things to deal with, which is totally fair and definitely true. Both employees dignified my inquiry with the same matter-of-fact inconsequence as one would a query about where to find the bathrooms, leading me to believe that managing spirits—both supernatural and behind the bar— is just part of the job at KGB.

I’ve been reflecting on my reaction to the blog post from seven years ago that briefly features KGB and decided that I’m not upset about it anymore. If you think about it, writing this column is actually a great example of the historical preservation and contemporary extension of dissenting ideas that makes KGB such an interesting sociopolitical institution. It’s so hard to be mad when the time-traveling haters praying on your downfall end up proving your point.

Anyways, I have a hunch that the ghosts of 85 East 4th Street are less interested in haunting than they are in finally enjoying the liberation of their political hideout. It would seem that KGB— and its ghosts— are not in the business of bringing the past to life, but rather bringing life to the past. The bar itself transports guests to a bygone time, but nightly readings from a range of writers and wooden tables scored by the initials of patrons allow the living to build upon generations of radical thought within the red-brick bounds of its once-vital interiority.

This, dear reader, is an excruciatingly germane lesson in the importance of structural preservation that Manhattan’s real estate developers could benefit from before building another all-glass Whole Foods on the East Side.