We mentioned before that one of our favorite haunts, The Cafe, was temporarily returning during Pride Weekend (using a special entertainment permit) as it was reach the end of a multi-million dollar remodel, with the intention of then re-closing for a few more weeks to finalize renovations before re-opening for good.
Perhaps it won't come as a big surprise to hear that the plan ran into a few snags. They did re-open during Pride, but it's now August 6th and The Cafe, while it's been open mostly for weekends for the last few weeks, still hasn't been able to jump through all of the permitting hoops to be able to re-open for good.
We'll go into more detail about The Cafe's subsequent weeks in a follow-up post. This one is specific to the festivities of Pride Weekend.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Thursdays at The Cafe always had a club event called Pan Dulce, a night with Latin music and go-go dancers. It's not our favorite night, to be honest (not a big fan of Latin music), but it was so much fun.
First, the decor. The Cafe got much, much more than a face lift. It was completely rebuilt from the ground up, practically -- actually, literally because it includes a three-story addition in the back. The front bar got pushed back (into a former storage area) and widened, allowing much more floor space. The back bar got rotated from East/West to North/South, also pushed back into a former storage area. (They're able to remove third floor storage areas because the new three-story addition allowed them to build more storage on floors not accessed by patrons.) And one of the most significant changes: The Cafe now has separate rest rooms for men and women! No more sharing. The women's has six stalls, and the men's has five separated urinals and three enclosed stalls. Unfortunately, over Pride, not all of the stalls were completed, which did lead to some predictible bathroom drama on Sunday, but no need to belabor that.
Not everything was completely done, of course. The interior walls were still unpainted sheetrock and the new ADA-compliant elevators were not yet working. But still, an amazing reconstruction.
More photos from Pan Dulce on Thursday. (Note: many of these photos are marked "restricted." To see the full set, create a few account on Flickr and then turn off SafeSearch in your account settings. If you then return to this blog in the same browser while still logged in, you'll be able to see the full set.)
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
Friday, June 26th
The return of Boy Bar party! One of our favorite events, it's The Cafe's regular Friday night party produced by club promoter Gus Presents.
Boy Bar features a flock of young go-go boys who dance for half-hour sets on the hour, every hour, taking a half hour break on the half-hour. They usually do at least one set in thematic costumes (not surprisingly, given the state of the bar's reconstruction, the go-go boys wore construction hardhats in one set).
Over the years, Kevin has taken over 5,000 photos of The Cafe -- and at least 60% were at Boy Bar. Here are a few more from that Pride Friday weekend:
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
Sunday, June 28th
We popped into The Cafe a little bit on Saturday night, but there are very few pictures, as most of the time was spent on the streets at the Pink Saturday block party in the Castro. We'll skip those ones and jump straight to the Pride Sunday festivities that we went to following the Parade & Celebration at the Civic Center. It was an excellent opportunity to see the model in daylight hours:
Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.
Coming soon: we'll show you many more photos of The Cafe from late July and early August following the interior painting and other finishing touches.
One of the more interesting and inovative changes to the Castro's gay nightlife scene is the introduction of aerolist rope performers at Trigger. 
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