The Palma Boys Social Club

Mob Hangout in Manhattan, New York

This is the former Palma Boys Social Club.

It is located at 416 East 115th Street in the East Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan, New York.

The club served as the headquarters of Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, a powerful capo who controlled the 116th Street Crew in the Genovese crime family.

The gang, which was also known as the Uptown Crew, ran a number of lucrative gambling, loansharking, and racketeering operations.

Palma Boys Social Club in The Irishman — Martin Scorsese recreated the Palma Boys Social Club for his epic gangster film The Irishman (2019). He was able to use the original building because it looked similar to how it did during Salerno's reign. It wasn't until 2021 that the exterior red bricks were painted brown.

The 116th Street Crew was comprised of Genovese mobsters and former members of the East Harlem Purple Gang, a notorious murder-for-hire and heroin trafficking organization that disintegrated during the late 1970s.

"Fat Tony" Salerno was born and raised in East Harlem. He maintained a regular presence in this neighborhood even after he rose through the ranks of the family.

Several days a week, he would arrive at the small, 990-square-foot social club with his trademark cigar and fedora to hold meetings, hand down orders, and settle disputes between mob figures.

In 1981, the FBI received intelligence that Salerno had become the official boss of the Genovese family. However, in 1986, agents learned that he was merely a "front boss"—a token position that deflected attention away from the real leader, Vincent Gigante.

This Google Street View image from 2019 shows what the building looked like before it was painted brown.

Salerno was indicted on racketeering charges in 1985 as part of the famous Mafia Commission Trial. His downfall proved to be a listening device that the FBI had planted in the Palma Boys Social Club in June 1983. The bug, which remained in place for more than a year, recorded him talking to dozens of senior mob figures about a wide range of crimes.

In January 1987, Salerno was sentenced to 100 years in prison without the possibility of parole.

He died behind bars five years later, at the age of 80.

Palma Boys Social Club address

The address and the GPS coordinates for this location are as follows:

Address

416 E 115th Street, Manhattan, New York, NY 10029, USA

Map

To view directions on how to get there, you can use the Google Maps shortcut below:

Google Maps

GPS coordinates

The latitude and longitude coordinates for the club are:

40.794972, -73.935310

Directions

It is roughly 200 feet east of the intersection between 1st Avenue and East 115th Street. The building lies to the north of Thomas Jefferson Park.

Private Property Warning

This is a private property. It is not a public place. Therefore, you should be respectful and not step foot on the property without permission.

Photos

Photos of the club and other related images.

416 E 115th Street

Image source: Google Maps

The Palma Boys Social Club was located at the bottom of this four-story tenement building on East 115th Street.

The building was constructed in 1910. Public records show that it was last sold for $2,145,000 in June 2016.

The social club was closed shortly after Salerno's arrest in 1985.

This section of East Harlem was known as Italian Harlem, as the streets between East 96th and East 125th Street had a large Italian community.

It was the first neighborhood in New York City where Italian immigrants settled together.

The community began to decline in the 1950s and 1960s, as many Italian Americans took advantage of the booming US economy by relocating from their cramped apartments to larger family homes in Brooklyn, Queens, New Jersey, and Long Island.

The post-war influx of Puerto Rican immigrants and the demolition of dilapidated, unsafe tenement buildings accelerated this change.