All the rest, upstairs – I think it was a six-story building - were offices. In between (the Orpheum and Brass Rail) was a sandwich shop - on the first floor, that is. Lou remembers the Orpheum, which occupied the corner at Fifth and B, “was the biggest theater at the time. Omar, younger, tall and bearded, introduced him as the man to talk to if I wanted to know about Hillcrest. He is at turns genial and gruff, businesslike and affable. Though he’s not gay, he has been owner or part-owner of numerous gay bars and considers himself a friend to the gay community. Lou’s hair is white, and he peers out though black horn-rimmed glasses. Omar is with us and adds his own insights and stories to Lou’s. I meet with Lou at #1 Fifth Ave., a bar owned by Omar Lowry, who has been tending bar in San Diego since 1969. Lou no longer owns the Brass Rail, but he owned it for a long time, long enough to see it flourish in its current location. In 1957, the restaurant and bar was purchased by Lou Arko. The Brass Rail was located at the corner of Sixth and B downtown, in the same building as what was then the Orpheum Theater. This was the first Brass Rail, and both restaurant and br were popular with theatergoers.” A chef wearing a tall white hat was always visible in the front window, and the food he prepared was extremely delicious…he old-fashioned image was completed by the authentic brass spittoons and a genuine brass rail. The August 31, 1973, issue of the Pacific Coast Times, a now defunct locally based magazine for gays and lesbians, features an interview with “Ed from the Brass Rail.” In it, he recalls an establishment that, “during the middle ‘30ss, became the smartest restaurant in town. We didn’t live in Hillcrest long after we married - we found a secluded guest house in Mission Hills that was more to our liking – but I often wondered how Hillcrest was chosen, if it was chosen at all, as the center of gay life in San Diego. What would my girlfriend, miles away in Kansas City, think? I had just rented a one-bedroom apartment with another man - an older, more muscular man - two blocks from the epicenter of San Diego’s gay district. On the side of the building hung a banner that read: “Every Wednesday - Whipped Cream Wrestling With The Go-Go Boys.” The banner was adorned with a drawing of na buff fellow in a thong, in case of any difficulty in imagining Go-Go Boys. The day I signed the lease, I took a walk down Fifth toward the shopping district, past the Brass Rail. (Something made me want to explain to the lady renting it to us that we would not be sharing a bedroom, but I wasn’t sure what.) Since I paid more rent, I slept in the bedroom, and he set up in the dining room, building a standing closet to serve as a partition from the rest of the apartment.
#LATINO GAY BAR SAN DIEGO WINDOWS#
The ceilings were high, the windows weighted, the rooms spacious, and most importantly, the place felt old and solid and elegant, like houses back East.Īn older guy I knew from college needed somewhere to live, so we rented the apartment together.
Thirty-six twenty-four, a one bedroom apartment on the first floor, was about to be vacated, and I jumped at it. There were no vacancies along Sixth, so I took my search back to Fifth Avenue and found the boxy, stately pink stucco house next door to Celadon. (This was before Gay Mart opened on the corner of Sixth and University.) A friendly guy who gave me directions struck me a probably being gay, but nothing else tipped me off.
By the time I got to University, I was enchanted by the look of the area, and when I chanced on Balboa Park, bordering Sixth Avenue, I knew where I wanted to live.
After three months of living in Little Italy and bumming around downtown, I went looking for an apartment and happened to turn left off of Grape Street and onto 5th Avenue. The Brass Rail provided the occasion for my own discovery of the gay community in Hillcrest, four years ago.