A corner with a past.

A four-story red-brick tenement goes up at the corner of Sixth Avenue and 24th Street, in the heart of Chelsea’s Tenderloin district — the vice corridor stretching from 23rd to 42nd between Fifth and Ninth, packed with theaters, saloons, gambling dens, and every lowdown enterprise a Gilded Age metropolis could support.

German immigrant brewers John Koster and Albert Bial — already operating a concert hall on 23rd Street and several restaurants near City Hall — annex the tenement as a beer garden and name it “The Corner.” The brownstone nameplates are still visible on the building today.

A disastrous partnership with Oscar Hammerstein at 34th Street fails. Both Koster and Bial die by the turn of the century. The Corner goes dark. The building cycles through commercial tenants for the next seven decades.

A former cigar store. No cover. Four-dollar beer. A free buffet no one will eat for thirty-one years. The original location is a few blocks south of where the bar will become famous.

Milton Anthony hangs a wood-type sign over the old Koster & Bial building. The bar settles into the ground floor of a tenement that has hosted vice and entertainment for nearly a century. Twenty-four chairs surround a small stage. The Tenderloin’s spiritual tradition continues.

Anthony, owner of the AP Variety Talent Agency (formerly the Mambo Hyde Talent Agency), acquires the bar. Born around 1920, he’s been providing go-go dancers to New York clubs since 1966. He establishes the house rules that will define Billy’s: no breast implants, no lap dances, no touching the dancers.

Robert Sietsema files Billy’s most enduring quote. The Voice treats the bar as a neighborhood landmark, not a scandal.

Swiss-born Beerle, a student at the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance, is killed by Daniel Rakowitz, who dismembers her body and distributes soup made from her remains to homeless people in Tompkins Square Park. Rakowitz is acquitted by reason of insanity. He is at one point suspected of having killed as many as eight former Billy’s dancers — a claim never substantiated. The case casts a brief, dark shadow over the bar.

Giuliani’s platform targets disorder, minor infractions, and the city’s adult entertainment industry — which he calls a threat to public “health, safety and welfare” and a “corrosive institution.”

The city amends its zoning resolution: adult establishments cannot operate within 500 feet of a residence, school, day-care center, or place of worship. The laws are drafted to clean up Times Square, but the radius captures small neighborhood bars like Billy’s. Manhattan Community Board 4 confirms there has never been a single citizen complaint against Billy’s Topless or its customers.

“Inside Billy’s Topless” runs in Vol. 28, No. 12. The piece captures Billy’s at the end of its era — the casual atmosphere, the working dancers, the regulars, all of it about to end.

Matt Damon, Edward Norton, and John Malkovich star in John Dahl’s poker drama. Billy’s is used as a location — the scene where the enforcer Grama finds Worm to collect a debt. The bar’s gritty interior plays itself.

To avoid closure under the new zoning laws, “Billy’s Topless” becomes “Billy Stopless” — the apostrophe removed from the sign in an act of wordplay so sad and so defiant it deserves its own monument. Dancers are required to wear bikini tops. Earnings drop from roughly $500 a night to $200. One patron is quoted: “You can see this on the beach for free. This is no fun.”

“Topless, and Dancing on the Edge; City’s Quality of Life Campaign Takes On a Strip-Club Tradition” runs April 29, 1998. The piece becomes the definitive account of Billy’s final years.

The Times piece documents the broader impact of Giuliani’s campaign on dancers and workers displaced from bars across the city.

Debbie Harry’s band pays tribute. Billy’s Topless is also referenced in a Season 1 episode of Will & Grace (“The Buying Game”), in which Will and Grace argue about proper venues for business negotiation.

Thirty-one years. No cover. No complaints. Gone.

The kind of detail a novelist would reject as too on-the-nose.

An establishment by the same name opens at 10th Avenue and 15th Street. Unknown connection to the original. It closes quickly.

Tony Stamolis photographs the empty interior for a project called “Quality of Life?” hung in the windows of Fun Box Times Square, an art space on 42nd Street. That building is also torn down soon after.

Sign the guestbook. Buy a shirt. Tell someone about the Tuesday in 1979 when two people talked about Joy Division.