Ramrod, West Street: The Greenwich Village Leather Bar Closed in 1980

The Ramrod was a gay leather bar at 394–395 West Street in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, between 10th Street and Christopher Street, sharing the blockfront with another gay bar, Sneakers. In the late 1970s and in 1980 the Village was widely treated as a center of gay life in the United States, and leather bars on that far-west strip were a map of cruise, dress code, and nightlife next to dungeon culture. Boots, jackets, hanky codes, and door policy made the Ramrod read as leather space rather than a generic gay bar. On 19 November 1980 a notorious shooting closed it for good. This is the public record of that attack and of the bar. It is not a method for getting a weapon or for carrying out violence.

Shortly before 11 p.m., Ronald K. Crumpley, a former New York City Transit Authority officer, began shooting indiscriminately at gay men in the Village with two stolen handguns. He first wounded two men outside a delicatessen at Washington and 10th Streets. They survived by hiding behind parked cars. The Ramrod was two blocks away. He then used an Uzi submachine gun fitted with a 40-round magazine, fired into the line of people waiting to enter the Ramrod, and shot through the window, hitting four people. Vernon Kroening, organist at nearby St. Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church, died immediately. Four others were wounded, including doorman Jorg Wenz, who died later that day at St. Vincent’s Hospital. Two patrons standing outside were wounded, and so was another patron inside. After shooting a man inside Sneakers, Crumpley continued and wounded two more men at Greenwich and 10th Streets, where he was arrested. The path runs through known gay nightlife spots. It was not a random fight inside one bar. The New York Times headlined it the “West Street Massacre.”

Crumpley was 38, African American, married, and a father of two. The Transit Authority had dismissed him for stealing credit cards. The day after the shooting he said, “I’ll kill them all – the gays – they ruin everything.” He claimed he was dismayed by interest that gay men he knew supposedly took in him. A minister’s son, he justified the murders with religious delusion: gay men were instruments of the Devil and were “trying to steal my soul just by looking at me.” He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and confined to a mental institution. In 2001 he sought a competency hearing and claimed his sanity was restored, but he showed homophobia in the proceedings. He stayed institutionalized and died in April 2015 at 73. The insanity finding did not remove the hate in the attack. Community histories still treat West Street in 1980 as anti-gay gun violence against leather-bar patrons and, more broadly, against gay men in the Village.

The New York Ramrod never reopened. Other gay leather bars later used the name as independent businesses, not a franchise, in the same way many bars call themselves the Eagle. A Boston Ramrod ran from 1981 to 2020. A Ramrod opened in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in 1994. The shared name is leather branding after the original bar’s murders. It does not reopen the West Street room or put Wenz back on the door. When someone says “Ramrod” across cities, New York in 1980 is the massacre site. Boston and Fort Lauderdale are later namesakes with their own local histories.