Long before its strip club days, building housed family tavern

When the strip club at the entrance to downtown Smithtown closed this summer, many residents were relieved. But the news was bittersweet for the Buckholz family, whose Cliff's Tavern occupied the building from 1945 through the 1970s.

That was decades before the Oasis Gentlemen's Club moved in and the family lived for a time in the three-bedroom apartment upstairs. "My bed was above the jukebox," said Erik Buckholz, 51, of Kings Park. As a boy in the 1970s, he’d help out in the kitchen, then sleep to the muffled sounds of Creedence Clearwater Revival songs from the bar below. "They’re etched into my brain," he said.

His grandparents, Clifton and Blanche Romero, bought the place for $2,000 after moving east from Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Cliff had been a machinist’s mate in the Navy during World War II and tended bar. Blanche cooked. She’d grown up in a different kind of liquor business; family lore had it that when she was a toddler she stirred illicit booze in the bathtub with an oar, under her father’s supervision.

When Clifton died in the late 1950s, Blanche took over with help from daughters Rose Marie and Lorraine, who later took the married surnames Bohr and Buckholz. Lorraine Buckholz, now 76 and living in Boca Raton, Florida, recalled her mother working 12-hour days, six days a week. Friday and Saturday nights were busiest. Sunday afternoons got busy too when the tavern became one of the first in town to show NFL games.

"I grew up there," Lorraine Buckholz said. They ran taps of Rheingold, Schlitz and Pabst served in 8-ounce glasses the mostly male clientele liked because in the short time it took to drink them the beer stayed cold. They served square hamburgers and shrimp baskets and on Fridays and Saturdays put out a midnight buffet of ziti, sausage and peppers.

On downtime when she was a girl, Lorraine Buckholz said, she swam in the Nissequogue River. Years later she built a swing for Erik on nearby municipal parkland. He caught his first fish in the river, a brown trout.

Family photographs Erik Buckholz shared show the tavern in its glory days with a massive sign out front enjoining the public to "Dine at Cliff’s." Another shows a 1958 "nightwork permit" allowing women to work nights, provided steps were taken to safeguard the "females" at the establishment.

The Buckholzes knew little about that document. Nancy Woloch, a research scholar in the Barnard College history department, cleared up the mystery: the permit was likely the product of a "protective law" passed to mitigate the "alleged dangers of working in hazardous environments such as bars, taverns, etc.," she wrote in an email. Such laws appeared in the Progressive era and began to vanish in the 1960s or earlier. "By the 1970s they were vanishing fast or gone," said Woloch, who wrote a book on the topic, "A Class By Herself."

Smithtown spokeswoman Nicole Garguilo said the town, which bought the building, may demolish or rebuild it, perhaps for use as a bait shop as part of an area restoration.

The Buckholzes liked that idea. Erik Buckholz, who deployed around the world as a Navy corpsman before returning to Smithtown and a job in human relations, said he saw the place a couple times a week while commuting to work or kayaking the river.

It became "a blight," he said, but "I don’t have a bad memory of the time I lived there … I always ended up going back."