By Patrick Hedlund

If the painted pitch-black walls of the famed Pyramid Club in the East Village could talk, they’d also sing, laugh — and likely gag.

Ask anyone who has spent time at the Avenue A nightspot about their experiences inside the historic venue, and you’re bound to be awed by tales of ribaldry and revolution, glamour and gaudiness.

It’s where performers named Brian and Jon became Hattie and Bunny, Hells Angels and skinheads mingled with filmmakers and drag queens, and creativity of all forms has been honored above anything else.

The confluence of those ideals — including the building’s early life as a social gathering space dating back to the 1800s — may well help the property’s push to achieve landmark status, according to a local preservation organization that recently undertook that effort.

As part of the Greenwich Village Society of Historic Preservation’s sweeping survey of the East Village, the group recently nominated the four-story tenement building at 101 Avenue A between Sixth and Seventh Streets for landmarking after uncovering a wealth of history at the property dating back 130 years.

A social and banquet hall in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the ground floor acted as a place of merriment and mourning for the many German-American immigrants who lived in the East Village during that time. As the neighborhood transitioned through the years, the space kept pace by morphing into a music and performance venue, all the while building on its reputation as a cultural Petri dish.

When it eventually became the Pyramid Club in 1979, the property had already served a century’s worth of patrons and organizers from the neighborhood.

But its history going forward — and the prominent role the club played in promoting performance art and drag culture — might be what eventually cements the preservation of the venue’s past on Avenue A.

“As we were doing this research, 101 Avenue A just jumped out at us,” said Andrew Berman, GVSHP executive director, of his organization’s block-by-block survey of the neighborhood. “It’s in some ways one of the more extraordinary illustrations of what the East Village is all about.”

In their research, Berman and the GVSHP found that the space originally housed the Kern’s Hall saloon after German-born architect William Jose oversaw its construction in 1876. From there, it became Shultz’s Hall, Fritz’s Hall, and more famously Leppig’s Hall for a 30-year stretch.

During its time as a meeting hall, it celebrated the opening of the adjacent Tompkins Square Park in 1879, acted as a gathering place for local laborers and unions, and memorialized the more than 1,000 people — many East Villagers of German descent — who died in the General Slocum steamship disaster in the East River in 1904.

“It kind of mirrors the East Village,” Berman said of the building’s uses through the years, also noting the façade’s elaborately detailed cornice, and stone, iron, and brickwork.

When counterculture bohemians and artists starting replacing the East Village immigrant community during the 1960s, the space adapted by becoming a music venue catering to multiple genres. A cultural center and theater by 1979, the space changed hands again — this time calling itself the Pyramid Club.

The name, according to former creative director Brian Butterick, stemmed from the original pyramid design found in the building’s tiling.

“It still had the vestiges of that neighborhood bar when we ran it,” said Butterick, who helped lead the performance-art and drag scenes that eventually brought the club to the height of its popularity. “But we always forced a little art and controversy down people’s throats in the process.”

Butterick once performed at the club in drag as Hattie Hathaway and now runs the Rapture Café a few blocks north on Avenue A. He quibbled with the narrow pigeonholing of the Pyramid at that time as a gay bar, noting it actually appealed to a “polysexual” clientele.

“Every happening nightspot in Manhattan was run by gays in those days,” he said, calling the emergence of drag performances in the ’80s the “biggest social revolution” at that time. “It changed from specific female impersonations to female interpretation.”

In fact, a “drunken party at 6 a.m.” in Tompkins Square Park, where club-goers donned wigs at an impromptu show, evolved into the gender-bending Wigstock festival featuring famous drag artists RuPaul, Lady Bunny, and Lypsinka.

“The Pyramid was the CBGB of drag and downtown performance culture,” said Village Voice columnist Michael Musto, who covered the club “as a bastion of high camp, low culture, and creative explorations.”

“It was a ramshackle place where struggling artists could take chances, make fools of themselves, and create beautiful work,” he added. “A springboard for some talent that eventually went more mainstream, as well as just a place where anyone with some nerve could nab a spotlight and some onlookers.”

Bobby Anger, who worked behind the bar on a recent Friday night, started coming down from Connecticut to visit the club in 1985 and has worked there in some capacity or other since 1989. He remembers coming to the club during one of its notorious “Trip and Go Naked” parties — where clubbers waiting in line earned swift admission if they stripped down outside — and witnessing all forms sexually explicit feats.

“There was the big discos and all that, but the Pyramid was something different,” Anger said. “It was about just having a place to perform… You could be that individual, and nobody would say anything.”

Performers at that time considered on the margins of socially palatable art sought refuge inside the Pyramid, which garnered an anything-goes reputation for allowing — and encouraging — experimental acts.

John Epperson, a.k.a. Lypsinka, started going to the Pyramid in 1984 and performed musical theater as well as drag at the venue.

“When I went there, I realized it was the ’80s equivalent of what the gay baths had been 14 or so years earlier, launching the career of Bette Midler,” Epperson said. “I just knew in my bones this was the place to be. And there was a built-in audience on Sunday nights that loved everything, no matter how awful. It was okay to try anything.”

Those who knew the Pyramid best in those days share Butterick’s view that it was not first and foremost a gay bar, pointing out that it catered more generally to an avant-garde and progressive crowd, drawing people from all walks of life.

Lower East Side documentarian Clayton Patterson, who photographed the club and also presided over the Tattoo Society that met there monthly, said the Pyramid championed organic art, which he explained as “making creations out of nothing.”

“That was the magic of it,” he said of Hells Angels joining drag performers at the club and skinheads working the door. “That’s the kind of strange crossovers you would get… It wasn’t about status, it was about creativity.”

Legend also has it that bands like Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers played their first New York City gigs there, joining acts like Madonna and Blondie, and further fermenting the club’s character as an artistic axis.

That rich history could play a deciding role in whether the property receives landmark status, said Lisi de Bourbon, a spokeswoman for the Landmarks Preservation Commission. She confirmed that the commission considers a building’s cultural, historical, and architectural significance, but that it’s difficult to assign relative weight to these factors.

A building’s social impact is “a difficult attribute to quantify,” de Bourbon said, adding that properties have been landmarked based purely on cultural influence in the past. However, she did not comment on where the commission’s evaluation currently stands.

A recent push to rezone the East Village makes the matter more urgent, Berman noted, saying that a needed city assessment of the neighborhood’s historic resources would help bolster a landmark designation.

“[The neighborhood] definitely deserves much more attention,” he said, “and the commission is clearly now taking a look at the East Village.”

Today at the Pyramid Club, the bawdy performances have been replaced by themed dance nights, many, though not all, of which appeal to gay men, who are however often outnumbered by their straight gal pals, according to Anger. He said women now dominate the club on nights pitched to gay crowds, though a recent visit showed the men at least outpacing the women on the dance floor.

“I think to some people it will always be considered a gay bar,” Anger acknowledged, with Musto agreeing that the club always had “an overriding gay sensibility.”

All those distinctions seem largely lost on most people who spent time at the Pyramid during its heyday. For them, it wasn’t necessarily about exactly who showed up on any given night, but the frisson that resulted when they all coalesced inside.

Butterick no longer has any affiliation with the club, but he still fondly reminisces about his time there and the cultural revolution he helped spawn. He even waxes spiritually about the historic space, suggesting the property will never leave behind its rich past.

“I think that walls and floors and the very land that something is on retains some of the soul of prior existences,” he said, adding that club regulars used to joke that the space sat on a former Indian burial ground. “I think that ghosts of the past live on there, so there will always be something happening there.”