P.S. Bar & Restaurant Gay Club San Francisco 1121 Polk Street FULL Matchbook for Sale

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P.S. Bar & Restaurant Gay Club San Francisco 1121 Polk Street FULL Matchbook For Sale

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P.S. Bar & Restaurant Gay Club San Francisco 1121 Polk Street FULL Matchbook:
$19.99

The *P.S. Bar & Restaurant Plus GAY San Francisco 1121 Polk Street 94109 FULL Matchbook
Own a VERY Rare Piece of Smoking / Advertising History / Matchbook Art
We areUNABLE TO SHIP BEYOND THE USA / NO INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING OR SALES
It is not a stock image. It is the actual item.
Please examine and take a close look at the item images..very close
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Items reallyshouldbe paid for almost immediately.There is a 48 hour limit before the buyer get\'s an automatic \"unpaid item reminder\" for not paying in a timely manner and will be unable to make additional purchases.
Expect your item to be sent out the next business day after being paid, using excellent packing materials.
We SHIPMONDAY-SATURDAYUNLESS THERE IS A HOLIDAY, IT WOULD BE THE NEXTBUSINESSDAY.
If you have any questions, a response is almostinstantly, 24 hours a day!!
Expect Great Service!
PS SAN FRANCISCO, VENUE DESCRIPTIONPS - Bar for older gay men, with an organist Thursday through Saturday playing old lounge songs.
*P.S. They Loved Youby Michael FlanaganMonday Nov 23, 2015
When we think of places that have built gay neighborhoods, restaurants may not be the first thing that comes to mind. We may think of clubs, bars and bathhouses.
But much like Compton\'s cafeteria was central to transgender history, there have been restaurants central to gay history as well. The *P.S. Bar and Restaurant at 1121 Polk Street was an anchor in the Polkstrasse for more than three decades and saw many luminaries, both behind and in front of its counters.
Bob Damron is perhaps now best known for Bob Damron\'s Address Book (aka the Damron Guide) , but in the late 1960s and early \'70s, he started many popular bars in San Francisco, including Febe\'s, Alfie\'s and the Rendezvous.
In late 1969-early 1970, when Polk Street was known as \"The Gayest Street in San Francisco,\" he opened the *P.S. as well. Prior to becoming the *P.S., the location had been a French restaurant, L\'Alouette, for nearly 50 years.
From the early days, the *P.S. shared its kitchen with the Casa de Cristal, a gay Mexican restaurant on Post Street also started by Damron. In 1971 he hired Bob Ross as a chef. It was while Ross was working there that he and his friend Paul Bentley came up with the idea for the Bay Area Reporter â€\" a newspaper to spread information in the community more efficiently. In the early days of the paper, Ross\' work with the Tavern Guild, at the *P.S. and the B.A.R. kept him very busy (and were quite intertwined).
In the early days of the restaurant, it was not exactly known for haute cuisine. An article from The San Francisco Chronicle in January 1974 was entitled, \"P.S.: A Pleasant Place for an Unpretentious Meal\" and noted that \"the meals are not always served hot, the result of poor co-ordination of timing between the kitchen staff and the waiters.\"
The reviewer recommended both the hamburger (\"cooked exactly as I requested it, with no off flavors\") and the daily special. He also noted that they had a respectable variety of wines. Most importantly the article noted, \"The Polk Gulch is Polk Gulch, and many of the customers at P.S. are gay, so if that fact bothers you perhaps you\'d better stick with your neighborhood steak house.\"Bob Ross shows off the meat selection at the *P.S. restaurantâ€™s kitchen. photo: Henry Leleu. Courtesy: GLBT Historical SocietyRegardless of the reviews of the food, the restaurant was quite popular. In 1978, it was purchased by the owners of The Mint - John Adinolfi, George Sanders and Tom Waddell (not the doctor who started the Gay Games, with whom that he shares a name).
This was probably due in part to its size. A 1980 B.A.R. article \"When Does a Restaurant Become an Institution?\" notes that the restaurant seated 135. Neighborhood foot traffic helped. Empress Marlena told me, \"There were seven or eight bars within a two block radius of the restaurant.\"
Another draw of the *P.S. was the characters who worked there. One of the main characters was the bartender Dixon Olivier, also known as \"Polk Street Sally.\" The 1980 B.A.R. article mentions he had been working at the bar since 1971 and had previously worked at other Polk Street institutions such as the Yacht Club and the Q.T. Dixon, who was crowned Imperial Royal Crown Prince of San Francisco by the Imperial Court, was known by his co-workers and patrons as \"the world\'s oldest living sex object.\"The *P.S. restaurant before opening for the day in the early 1970s. courtesy GLBT Historical SocietyAnd though the bar was lively, it was still a safe enough for Randy Shilts, writing in The Chronicle in 1982, to suggest bringing mom to the piano bar \"when she finally comes to visit.\"
Likewise Ruthie Stein suggested in an article on sing-along bars (also in The Chronicle) that you brush up on Rogers & Hart and Cole Porter before visiting Bob Sanders behind the keys, but the visitor is warned \"the reason the P.S. doesn\'t have an open mike is that they\'d all be grabbing for it.\"
By the 1980 article, the owners were trying to improve the cuisine at the *P.S. as well. They hired Executive Chef Surachai Rungpha (known as \'Chai\' around the restaurant) onboard. Chai had learned to cook at his mother\'s restaurant in Thailand and had been sous chef at MacArthur Park and Julius\' Castle when he came to *P.S. His specialty was Veal Vittoria (a relative of Veal Scallopini) as well as Chicken Piccata and Calamari Sciliana.John Hemm (2nd-right) with other *P.S. wait staff in the kitchen on New Yearâ€™s Eve 1983. Photo: courtesy John HemmI interviewed John Hemm, who worked as a waiter and tended bar at the *P.S. from 1981 through 1984. He recalled the camaraderie and the sense of fun.
\"It was the most exciting fabulous place to work, with pretty waiters and gorgeous food.\"
Hemm pointed out that the bar was a few blocks from The Plush Room, and that often performers would come to the *P.S. for breakfast or after performances. He recalled seeing both Johnny Ray and Charles Pierce there. Janet Gaynor was a regular as was Valerie Harper\'s mother (Iva McConnell), Sylvester and pianist Frank Banks.
Hemm said waiters were often hired on their looks. \"You felt like a Playboy Bunny â€\" it was a whole different era.\"John Hemm as Marilyn Monroe with Iva Harper and Ivaâ€™s friend Bud at the *P.S. on Halloween night 1984 (his last night working there).Pat Montclaire, who was working at the Hideaway in Church Street Station, would do flower arrangements, and Leticia, who would go on to start her eponymous restaurant, worked next door at Casa de Cristal.
A photographer who went by the name \"Pictures by Polly\" would take Polaroids for patrons, presenting them with their mementos of the evenings there.
While Hemm was working at *P.S., Master Chef Paul Dufour from Le Trianon, La Cabane and Le Bourgogne replaced Chai. Master Chef Dufour was something of a celebrity himself. He had appeared on Dinah Shore\'s talk show in the 1970s and had developed his own Vertical Roaster. Hemm recalls that he was an incredible chef and a lovely man as well. \"We called him Papa.\"
There was a dark side as well, however. Hemm reminded me that the hustlers in that portion of Polk could be particularly threatening. He recounted a patron in his 20s who was chased into the bar because a group thought he was trying to cut into their business. Drug use was rampant. Hemm commented on how ironic it was to have a restaurant named Casa de Cristal in the neighborhood. The *P.S. provided valet parking for safety as well as convenience.The menu for a 1970s â€œThanksgiving feastâ€ at the *P.S. restaurant. courtesy GLBT Historical SocietyIn March 1986, the *P.S. restaurant came to a sudden end. In a story all too familiar in 21st-century San Francisco, Wayne Friday reported in the B.A.R. that the restaurant lost its lease and faced a near tripling of their rent. As Friday wrote, \"That greed not only forced the closing of a tradition, but of course put a few dozen people out of work.\"
The story does not, however, end there. Late in 1990, Sweet Lips\' column became abuzz with news that the bar would be opening again, and on December 27, 1990, The New Belle Saloon moved into the space and reopened as the *P.S. It remained in that spot, and with that name as a piano bar, until late 1997.
In 1998, Katie\'s Cocktail Lounge followed (with many workers from the *P.S.), only to be replaced by Blur in 2004.