The Mineshaft: Iconic Place
The Mineshaft Leather Bar and Wally Wallace
The club’s story is tied to its founder and manager, Wally Wallace, who ran it in New York’s Meatpacking District from October 1976 until its closure in November 1985. Jack Fritscher was among the first journalists to write about the club for a national audience, with reports in Drummer issues 19 and 20 in 1977 and 1978, and he returned to Wallace’s story in a videotaped interview on March 28, 1990. That conversation, published in Profiles in Gay Courage, ranges from Robert Mapplethorpe’s visits to the staged police raid that William Friedkin’s crew engineered while making Cruising, and to the pressures of AIDS and taxation that closed the doors. Together these pieces preserve a place that existed for only nine years but left a lasting mark on gay leather culture.