That was her style.”īorn in the spring of 1904 on Cleveland’s East Side, Estelle Gloria Stefanski was the elder child and only daughter of Polish-Catholic immigrants Anton and Anna Rutkowsky Stefanski, who arrived in Cleveland in 1896. “In Europe, the owner sits at the far end of the bar to watch what the bartender is doing,” he said. When she wasn’t policing her patrons, she held court on her favorite stool to keep an eye on the cash register, as retired professor Bill Fairchild remembered her. The club’s policies came courtesy of its matronly owner, Gloria Lenihan, who demanded decorum and civility in the first-ever openly gay nightclub in Cleveland history. You had to wear a shirt and a tie and a jacket to get in there.” “We used to refer to it as ‘General Motors,’” Len Barnhart said as he chuckled at the memory. On the southwest corner of East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue, gay men treated the two-story Cadillac Lounge as their personal playground in the midst of dozens of straight clubs that lined Cleveland’s busiest thoroughfares. The city’s LGBT population was no exception. In the 1950s, when Cleveland ranked as the country’s seventh largest metropolis, the city’s downtown district buzzed with theatergoers on Playhouse Square, music aficianados on Short Vincent and clubhoppers everywhere in between.
