for three decades and worked at Cinch for 19 years, often looks a little different when he’s not on the clock. Dan Gentile / SFGATEīerchtold, who has lived in S.F.
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Those extended closures left manager Eric Berchtold with some free time on his hands.īar manager Eric Berchtold poses on the back patio of Cinch Saloon. The bar shuttered from March through August 2020, then again from October to January. The bar is expected to stay open through September.Like so many bars around the city, the pandemic forced Cinch to temporarily close its doors. “I think it’s been changing so much in the past few years.” “San Francisco has changed a lot since I first got here,” he said. Mica Sigourney, who performs under the drag name VivvyAnne Forevermore!, is working to form a cooperative to buy the business. Now, McElhaney said, he wants to return to Honolulu, to be with his aging mother.īut before he does, he wants to make sure the bar is in good hands. In 1996, on his birthday, he bought the business with a colleague who has since died. “It just felt like the most beautiful mix of imagery and people and music that I’d ever experienced in my life and I fell in love immediately.”
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“I walked into a room full of people that was so diverse, mixed, strange, beautiful,” McElhaney said. I know that’s kind of odd to say, but it’s the building, and everyone mentions it when they come in. So does McElhaney, who walked into the bar in the summer of 1987 and knew that he had come home. “It’s hard to see something like that sort of pushed aside, which is almost what it feels like.”Ĭoombs remembers the first time he visited the bar, seven years ago, as does his boyfriend, Roy Huber, who was introduced to the place two decades ago by his mom’s best friend’s marijuana dealer. “With all the changes that are going on, with all the new construction, there’s a sense that this culture and everything that finds a home at this bar is sort of being diluted,” Coombs said. Most regulars live within walking distance, including Chris Coombs, a 31-year-old merchant marine who stopped by the Stud on Tuesday evening to enjoy a Pabst with his boyfriend. I know that’s kind of odd to say, but it’s the building, and everyone mentions it when they come in,” said bartender Bernadette Fons, who has worked there for a decade.
“The minute you come in, you just feel this warmth. Inside its current space, there are gilt mirrors and a disco ball and a small performance stage.
The Stud opened in 1966 and quickly gained a reputation as a spot with a hippie vibe and eclectic customers. The once-empty lot next to the bar is being turned into housing. Across the street is Thumbtack, a startup where Jeb Bush held a town hall last year as part of his failed presidential bid, famously arriving in an Uber. The Stud is in South of Market, a still gritty and historically gay part of San Francisco where developers are rapidly building condos and restaurants to cater to tech workers who can afford $4,500 for a one-bedroom apartment. San Francisco has steadily shed coin-op laundries, neighborhood dive bars and auto-repair shops - all certainly part of natural turnover but hurried along by changing owners and rising rents. The tale is familiar in a city that is becoming ever wealthier with the arrival of newcomers taking high-paying technology jobs downtown or in nearby Silicon Valley. Interested in the stories shaping California? Sign up for the free Essential California newsletter >
On Sunday, he called an emergency meeting to break the news to regulars. In June, the building was sold, and the bar’s owner received a notice that the monthly rent for the 2,800-square-foot space would leap from $3,800 to $9,500 in September. A sign at the front door, decorated with gold tinsel, reads: “Everybody is welcome at The Stud.
One of the nation’s most celebrated gay bars may soon go out of business after a new landlord more than doubled the rent, part of a trend that has old-timers lamenting that the San Francisco they know and love - dilapidated and diverse - is disappearing.Īt 50 years old, the Stud is the longest continuously running gay bar in the city and known throughout the country as one of the bohemian, gender-bending, anything-goes institutions that made San Francisco into a gay mecca.