Mike Lyons' Restaurant building

261 Bowery | Lower East Side | built 1910

Open on the map4 entries

The lot about 1940
About 1940. Via 1940s.nyc
The lot about 1985
About 1985. Via 80s.nyc

The city photographed every building for its tax records around 1940 and again in the 1980s. NYC Municipal Archives.

Written with AI from the source each entry cites, then fact-checked.

  1. 1870

    Cunningham & Lyons opens a corned beef and cabbage restaurant at 261 Bowery

    A restaurant opened here in 1870 under the partnership of Cunningham and Lyons. In 1878 Mike Lyons took full ownership, and the place drew theatergoers, museum visitors and sightseers walking the Bowery. The National Register nomination counts Lyons' among the businesses at the center of the street's political, theatrical and sporting life in the late 1800s.

    “Mike Lyons’s Restaurant (261 Bowery or 259-261 Bowery) opened in 1870 as Cunningham & Lyons “a corned beef and cabbage house.”…”

    Source: National Register nomination

  2. 1905

    Mike Lyons has to hunt up a key after 33 years of round-the-clock service

    Lyons' restaurant stayed open day and night from 1872 until 1905, and at 5 a.m. the leftovers went to the neighborhood's down-and-out men. When business slowed that year, Lyons had to call a locksmith to make a key so the doors could be locked at midnight. He blamed reformers for killing the old Bowery, as theaters closed and the gambling halls went quiet.

    “Open around the clock from 1872 until 1905, at 5am, leftovers were offered to “Bowery men.” “In the palmy days when the Bowery was a blaze with light,”…”

    Source: National Register nomination

  3. 1910

    March

    Mike Lyons closes his Bowery restaurant and predicts the street's future is wholesale

    The restaurant closed in 1910 after four decades at 261 Bowery. A reporter asked Lyons to predict what lay ahead for the Bowery, and he answered with a single word: wholesale.

    Source: National Register nomination

  4. 1983

    The Buskers Club, a short-lived rock venue, occupies the old Lyons address

    In 1983 the building housed the Buskers Club, a rock venue that did not last long. Ephemeral New York shows an ad for it from the East Village Eye, along with a separate 1983 ad for CBGB, a little north at 315 Bowery. The blog notes that 261 Bowery had been home to Mike Lyons Restaurant for decades, about a century earlier.

    Source: Ephemeral New York

Further reading

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