McGurk's Suicide Hall (or McGuirk's, the standard Irish spelling but less often seen in reference to the Hall), technically McGurk's Saloon, was a beer parlor, in the loosest sense of that word, and whorehouse at 295 Bowery in the New York City district of the same name, richly mentioned in Asbury's Gangs of New York and no doubt other histories of the bad side of the city in those years. It was opened in 1893 in a former hotel by one John McGurk or Patrick McGuirk (again records vary, with the former by far the most common), of unsurprising moniker, a decidedly ungentle man who apparently had an astounding knack for depravity even by the standards of fin-de-siècle New York.
His saloon, which almost immediately gained a reputation as the worst, lowest dive in the city, obtained its common appellation from the copious number of prostitutes working there who killed themselves — a fact McGurk himself boasted about; more whores died in his place, he claimed, than anywhere else on earth. (At some point he had the enticing slogan »Better Dead« carved into the lintel over the front door.) The place was such a hellhole (another of its popular nicknames, incidentally) that they had to invent the bouncer; the first such officer history records is John »Eat-'Em-Up Jack« McManus, who kept the disorder at McGurk's.
Such carrying-on could not last, of course; and it didn't. McGurk's Suicide Hall closed in 1902, after less than a decade in operation, leaving, no doubt, few mourners. 295 Bowery became a cheap restaurant and flophouse, and was finally torn down in 2005 to make room for the new rock bottom in Manhattan depravity — apartments for the merely well off.
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