Club New Yorker was opened on the former site of the Greenwich Village Café. The club was situated in a basement adjacent to the Christie Hotel, with access from the street by a steep staircase.

It was a popular gathering place for LGBT persons. It featured actor Jean Malin, a female impersonator, reportedly one of the highest paid MCs in during the short-lived "Pansy Craze." "A six-foot-tall, 200-pound bruiser who also had an attitude and a lisp." A Hollywood trade paper quipped in September 1932, "Were you at the Club New Yorker [in Hollywood] the other night when Jean Malin announced that he was 'all fagged out?' Whoops!"

Malin died in a freak car accident in August 1933 at age 24.