Bohemia Historical Society
The Central Hotel
A century of Sunday dinners, Czech theater, and belonging on Smithtown Avenue
Location: 1290 Smithtown Avenue • Status: Demolished (destroyed by fire, c. 1980s)
1880s–1931
The Industrial Genesis: Bohemia and the Age of Cigars
The economy that made the Central Hotel possible was built on tobacco. Czech immigrants arrived in New York already skilled cigar makers. According to historical records, as many as 90 percent of Bohemian immigrants in Manhattan’s Czech neighborhoods — concentrated between East 65th and East 79th Street near the East River — were employed in the cigar trade. Many had come from the region around Kutná Hora in central Bohemia, home to a poorly-paying government tobacco factory; they arrived already knowing the craft and eager to practice it for better wages. One period source noted that “the factories in the regions of Seventieth street, New York, are filled with Bohemian women and girls employed in the making of cigars.”
When Czech families migrated from Manhattan to the Long Island hamlet in the second half of the 19th century, they brought that trade with them. By the 1880s and 1890s, Bohemia had become the cigar-manufacturing hub of Long Island. At its peak, the village was home to eight large factories and dozens of smaller “Buckeye” shops — family-run operations in backyard workshops where men and women rolled cigars by hand after their day work in the fields. Notable factories included Albert Kovanda’s operation on the corner of Lakeland and Smithtown Avenues, and the M. Foster Cigar Factory at Ocean Avenue and Church Street. Together, these establishments produced millions of cigars annually for the New York City market.
It was into this industrial landscape that Frank Huml Sr. arrived in 1890. Like many of his countrymen, Huml had begun his working life as a blacksmith — but he recognized the opportunity in tobacco and pivoted into the cigar trade. He eventually opened what became known as the Huml Hotel on Smithtown Avenue, a modest but strategically placed establishment that would, over the following century, evolve into one of the most layered social institutions in the history of Long Island’s Czech communities.
The cigar industry that underpinned this world would survive until the 1930s, when the Great Depression combined with the rise of automated manufacturing machines rendered hand-rolling economically obsolete. By 1930, all eight factories had closed. The Huml cigar factory itself burned down in 1931. But by then, the hotel on Smithtown Avenue had long since outgrown its dependence on the tobacco economy.
1890–1928
The Huml Hotel Era: Commerce, Governance, and Community
During the first decades of its existence, the hotel that would eventually be called the Central served as something closer to a village commons than a simple inn. In the absence of dedicated municipal buildings, it was the default gathering place for nearly every important function in Bohemia’s civic life.
Most significantly, it was here that the Bohemia Fire Department held its earliest organizational meetings. Long before the first dedicated firehouse was constructed in 1894, Hook & Ladder Co. #1 was organized in the meeting rooms of the Huml Hotel. The hotel thus became the birthplace of the village’s fire protection infrastructure — a fitting origin for a building that would itself eventually be destroyed by fire.
The hotel also functioned as a hiring hall and information exchange in an era when private telephone lines were rare and news traveled slowly. Factory owners and hand-rollers met here to negotiate tobacco prices and wage structures. Residents gathered to hear reports from New York City. If a contractor needed to be hired or a laborer needed work, the Huml Hotel was the place to make the connection. This information-brokering role gave the hotel owner a uniquely powerful position in village life — a gatekeeper of social and economic opportunity.
Frank Huml Jr., who was born into this world and would later build the still-standing Huml structure on Smithtown Avenue in 1926, was described as a lifelong tobacconist who embodied the “American Dream” realized in Bohemia. The Huml family’s decades-long presence at the intersection of the cigar trade, the hotel business, and village civic life made them among the most influential founding families of the community.
At some point the establishment became known simply as “Bill’s Hotel” before passing through additional hands. In 1928, the property was purchased by the Stejskal family — and the hotel entered its most celebrated chapter.
1928–1954
The Stejskal Era: Sunday Dinners and the Old Country at the End of a Bus Ride
By 1928, the suburban migration from New York City to Long Island was well underway, and Bohemia had developed a new identity: a destination for Czech-Americans from Manhattan who wished, at least for a Sunday afternoon, to escape the tenements and reconnect with the world their parents and grandparents had left behind.
Barney Stejskal and his family recognized this longing and built their entire business around satisfying it. Under their stewardship, the Central Hotel became a regular stop for tourist buses traveling from the city. The passengers were overwhelmingly Czech immigrants and their American-born children, people who had grown up in the dense Czech neighborhoods of the Upper East Side — Yorkville and its surroundings — and who sought a literal and metaphorical taste of the Old Country. The centerpiece of this ethnic tourism was the Sunday dinner.
Prepared by Mrs. Stejskal and her daughters Helen and Georgiana, these meals were served family-style: heaping platters passed around large communal tables, laden with the foods that defined Czech holiday cooking. Roast duck (pečená kachna), slow-cooked until the skin crisped to gold and the meat fell from the bone, seasoned with caraway seeds and served with sauerkraut and potato dumplings (knedlíky). Roast pork with the same accompaniments. The Czech national combination — vepřo-knedlo-zelo, pork, dumplings, and sauerkraut — had been a fixture of Czech Sunday lunch culture for generations; at the Central Hotel it was elevated into a ritual of belonging.
These were not ordinary restaurant meals. For many of the visitors, the food at the Central Hotel was the closest thing available to their grandmothers’ cooking. The Czech relationship with Sunday lunch is deeply ceremonial — roast duck, in particular, is reserved for holidays and special occasions, a festive centerpiece that signals abundance and celebration. By serving it weekly, the Stejskals transformed every Sunday visit into a small holiday, a performance of heritage for an immigrant community navigating the tension between assimilation and memory.
The Central Hotel’s culinary reputation outlasted even the Stejskal ownership. In 1987 — more than three decades after the family sold the property — Helen Navratil, who had cooked at the hotel for many years, supervised a sold-out Czech dinner for the Bohemia Historical Society at the Masonic Temple in Sayville. The event was a testament to how deeply the hotel’s kitchen had embedded itself in local identity.
The Ballroom: A Cultural Fortress Upstairs
Above the dining room and barroom, the Central Hotel’s upstairs ballroom served a function that went beyond entertainment. It was, in the fullest sense, a cultural fortress. The ballroom hosted masquerades, traveling theatrical troupes, and most notably the Ochotnické Divadlo — the amateur theater productions that were a cornerstone of Czech-American cultural life. These performances were often conducted in the Czech language, a deliberate effort to preserve linguistic tradition for American-born children who might otherwise grow up speaking only English.
This was not unusual for Czech immigrant communities. As observers of the era noted, Bohemians were known to be “cigar makers during the day but actors at night.” Czech theatrical culture had always been intertwined with national identity; in Bohemia NY as in Manhattan’s Czech neighborhoods, amateur theater was a form of resistance against cultural erasure.
The Central Hotel’s ballroom operated alongside the CSA (Czecho-Slovak Protective Society) Hall north of Union Street, which also hosted dramas and comedies. But the hotel’s combination of food, drink, lodging, and performance space made it a more immersive venue — visitors could arrive by bus from the city, eat a Czech meal, watch a Czech play, and sleep under a Czech roof before returning to Manhattan the next morning. The hotel was also the venue for the community’s social calendar: fraternal organization meetings, dances, holiday celebrations, and the kind of informal civic gatherings that kept a small community cohesive across generations.
1932
Catastrophe and Reconstruction: The Fire of 1932
In 1932, the original Central Hotel building was destroyed by fire—not the last time that fate would visit this address. On the early morning of July 22, 1932, a blaze broke out that burned the building to the ground, resulting in an estimated $15,000 in losses. Joseph Stejskal, the proprietor at the time, was asleep upstairs with his son, Barney, and daughter, Helen. At about 5:00 a.m., Joseph smelled smoke at the exact moment a local milkman noticed flames breaking through the roof. The milkman broke into the hotel to rouse the family, allowing them to escape to safety with only the clothes they could grab.
The blaze was a significant disruption to the village’s social fabric. But the Stejskal family’s immediate decision to rebuild spoke to the hotel’s indispensability. Within a reasonable period, a new structure rose at 1290 Smithtown Avenue, modernized but committed to the traditions of its predecessor.
Barney Stejskal, who later shared the hotel’s history in oral accounts preserved by the Bohemia Historical Society, recalled that the rebuilding period was defined by continuity of purpose: the “family-style Czech hospitality” that had made the hotel famous was never interrupted in spirit, even as the physical building was replaced.
Barney himself was far more than a hotel keeper. He was an active member of the local school board, a participant in the Bohemia Historical Society, and a dedicated volunteer firefighter. His involvement in the fire department was particularly notable: he was part of “The Suicide Squad,” the Bohemia Fire Department’s elite racing team, which remained undefeated in Suffolk County competition from 1934 to 1938—a period that overlapped almost exactly with the hotel’s rebuilding and revitalization.
1954
Transition and Legacy: The Sale of 1954
By the mid-1950s, the world around the Central Hotel had fundamentally changed. The postwar suburban boom was transforming Long Island at an extraordinary pace. Veterans returning from World War II, subsidized by the GI Bill and drawn by the promise of new Levittown-style housing, poured into Suffolk County. Bohemia’s character shifted from a secluded Czech enclave to a modern suburb with a Czech past. The old industries were gone, the original immigrant generation was aging, and the social functions that had once made the hotel indispensable — the information exchange, the hiring hall, the cultural touchstone for city visitors — were either obsolete or serving a shrinking audience.
In 1954, the Stejskal family sold the property, closing the most celebrated chapter in the hotel’s history. Under subsequent ownership, the building continued to operate as a bar and gathering place, but the intense cultural programming of the Stejskal years gave way to a more generalized neighborhood tavern function. The hotel passed through the hands of various proprietors as Bohemia’s demographics shifted and the Czech-American community that had built it became more diffuse.
1970s–1980s
The Hawk and the Dove: A New Generation Finds a Home
The final named chapter of the building’s life unfolded under the Sholly family, when the establishment was renamed The Hawk and the Dove. This era represents a striking evolution in the property’s social function — one that connects the hotel’s long history of providing community to a different group entirely. Research into the Bob Damron Address Books, the annual travel guides published beginning in 1964 that served as an essential resource for gay travelers across America, reveals that the Central Hotel appeared in listings for 1970 to 1972. The entries included a “D” amenity code, indicating that dancing was a primary attraction.
The Damron guides occupied a cultural role that is difficult to overstate. First published in an era when homosexuality was criminalized in most states, they functioned in a similar way to the Green Book used by Black travelers in the Jim Crow era — a coded map to spaces where a person could safely be themselves. The guides were designed to be small enough to fit in a pocket and inconspicuous enough to avoid notice; their publisher understood that visibility could be dangerous. By the late 1980s, over 100,000 copies were in circulation annually.
For the Central Hotel to appear in these listings in the early 1970s — in suburban Long Island, in a small hamlet where the social world had been built around Czech ethnic identity — is historically significant. It suggests that the building’s long tradition of providing a welcoming space, whether for Czech factory workers, Manhattan visitors on tourist buses, or amateur theater audiences, had extended naturally into a new form of hospitality. In a suburban landscape largely devoid of visible queer community spaces, the Hawk and the Dove offered something rare: a place to gather, to dance, to belong.
c. 1980s
The End of an Era: The Second Fire
Like many of Bohemia’s original wooden landmarks — Mazanek’s establishment, the original Huml cigar factory — the Central Hotel met its end in flames. Sometime in the 1980s, a fire completely destroyed the structure at 1290 Smithtown Avenue. The site today is unrecognizable, giving no indication of the century of history that unfolded there.
The loss echoed other losses. The cigar factories were gone. The immigrant generation was gone. The Sunday bus excursions from Manhattan had ended decades earlier. The physical building was only the last thing to disappear.
Memory Lane Chapter 37: The Hotels of Bohemia
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