Jack Falat, Come To Man’s Country – Village Cigars. 110 7th. Avenue, Greenwich Village, New York City, New York USA (1974)
A block from the Stonewall Inn, Village Cigars marked the start of the West Village proper, by which was understood the epicenter of gay life in NYC. Its centrality to gay life was not lost on the people who *ahem* erected the signs above it that both parody Marlboro's long-running "Come to Marlboro Country" ad campaign and also rather forcefully advertise the Man's Country bathhouse on 15th Street.
Opened in 1972 in Brooklyn, the bathhouse moved to its Chelsea location in 1978 and advertised "ten floors of fantasy," including, per Wikipedia, "the truck stop, a 'full-sized red tractor-trailer cab [that...] was mostly the site of a continuous orgy;' the jail tank, a mock holding cell; a Jacuzzi; and a restaurant called the Meet Rack." It closed, with the advent of the AIDS crisis, in 1983.
In the phrase attributed to Dorothy L. Sayers in her copywriting days, it pays to advertise.
