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MARCO WERMAN: New York City has its fair share of interesting buildings. The most fascinating ones are not merely architectural gems, they've got stories to tell. One example is Bohemian National Hall on Manhattan's Upper East Side. It's an ornate brick and stone palazzo built in the late 19th Century, and the building has a long memory. The World's Alex Gallafent takes us there.
ALEX GALLAFENT: Half a century ago, you could head to Bohemian National Hall and start your day with a Pilsner, a frothy Czech beer. One sip in that place and you were in Czechoslovakia.
ALEX CECH: This is the custom in Prague. You know, they had what they call morning bars. You didn't know that? Yeah.
GALLAFENT: That voice belongs to Alex Cech, spelled without a 'Z' in the middle. Cech's 80 years old, very much alive. His wife, too.
CECH: She's very ... She's very ... She's too much alive, I would say.
GALLAFENT: In the late '50s, they often visited Bohemian National Hall for dinner.
CECH: There was a waiter called Karl Veterna [PH]. That was the only waiter who was there all that time, and so usually he would serve, you know, pork roast with gnedel. Then we were sitting there quietly for two hours and drinking the Pilsner. You know, you call it run down but at the same time, it has a beautiful patina. You know, we lived basically in the past. It's beautiful. I enjoyed it very much.
GALLAFENT: Bohemian National Hall was a classy sort of place, even if it was a bit run down by mid-century. Just the sort of place where you'd expect Alex Cech to spend his time. He's a dapper man. There's the expensive dark suit, and immaculate tie, and the quiet flourish of a polka dot pocket square. He left Czechoslovakia in 1948 when Communists took power. Seven years later, he made it to the United States.
CECH: In 1955, yeah.
[ORCHESTRAL MUSIC]
GALLAFENT: Bohemian National Hall arrived in New York long before Alex Cech did. It was founded in 1895, paid for by donations from the community. One fundraising event featured the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, who'd recently arrived in the city. The five-story building crammed in a restaurant and bar, club rooms, a basement bowling area, a shooting range, and an ornate ballroom. For the next few decades, the hall was a center of gravity for Czechs in the United States. So, if you'd visited in the late '50s, you might have seen Alex Cech there in the restaurant having a quiet dinner with his wife, and you might have run into some kids including a 9 or 10 year-old named Joseph Kubat.
JOSEPH KUBAT: We crawled all over this building.
GALLAFENT: Joe's 62 now, still lives in the neighborhood. His sister was married in the Hall. Joe was educated there.
KUBAT: There was a Czech school and a Slovak school on the second floor, and after regular school we would come here five days a week in the afternoons and on Saturdays.
GALLAFENT: Irene Mergl went to the same school just a few years before Joe. Her father insisted on it.
IRENE MERGL: There were no questions asked, "Would you like to?" As parents have a tendency to say nowadays, "Would you like to?" No question about it.
GALLAFENT: The Hall gave Irene Mergl the opportunity to speak Czech. It also gave her a chance to meet boys. There were dances every Saturday night. Some evenings were more memorable than others.
[FRANKIE AVALON SINGING "VENUS"]
MERGL: I guess when I was 16 or 17 and I was in the bar and a fight broke out and I couldn't leave. It had swinging doors and I couldn't leave and, you know, this thing escalated and there I am this kid pinned up against the bar. And I remember the bartender helping me crawl over the bar to safety on the other side. Sounds silly but I never forgot it.
GALLAFENT: When Irene Mergl and Joe Kubat were young, the neighborhood was working class and Czech.
KUBAT: From roughly 69th Street to say 75th or 76th you had to speak Czech to get by in this community.
GALLAFENT: By the time Alex Cech arrived in the mid 1950s, it was all changing. For one thing, immigration from Communist Czechoslovakia had pretty much stopped. The only Czechs who made it over here were dissidents and as property prices went up, the Czech community moved out to the suburbs. Bohemian National Hall was neglected, left behind. Fast forward to 2001. Communist Czechoslovakia is a thing of the past. There's Slovakia and the Czech Republic, both democracies. The Czechs buy the Hall, paying a nominal one dollar. They renovate the whole building and hand over space to the local community, and they keep one floor of Bohemian National Hall for themselves. Today, it's where you'll find the Czech Consulate. The Hall is more formal than it used to be. Instead of beers for breakfast at the morning bar, there's a polished library. But for Alex Cech, it remains what it always was.
CECH: For me and for most of us, the building was our country. There is no other building which can substitute. It was a building which our ancestors built and this building is part of our lives and that's it.
GALLAFENT: There's a Czech inscription on a plaque in the ballroom. It could describe what this building has meant to some Czech Americans.
CECH: The nation itself.
GALLAFENT: The nation and the Hall have been transformed over the last 100 years, but they're both still here. For The World, I'm Alex Gallafent, New York.
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Bohemian National Hall