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It now is owned by McMenamin’s and was restored as the Crystal Hotel, with a grand reopening in May 2011. Until its closure, it was the oldest continuing gay bathhouse in the city. Majestic Hotel and Club Portland Bath, 303 S.W. This suggests that perhaps the location was already attracting some gays back then.
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It is quite possible that it may have had a gay clientele even earlier that the late ’60s, because Robert Saunders, who also owned the very gay Tel & Tel Tavern on Oak, attempted to open this site under the name of The Mocambo in 1960, but the application for a dispenser class license was refused by the Oregon Liquor Control Commission. The oldest continuing gay bar on Stark, operating from the late 1960s until the 2000s under various names. Stark, formerly known as Riddles, Stark Street Station, Flossie’s, now part of the Crystal Hotel development. One, the manager, was identified in the records as “Miss Lewis” who had “served eight years in the service with an honorable discharge,” and the other a young woman of 22 who moonlighted in the evenings following her day job at Meier & Frank.
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The only employees at the Milwaukee Tavern were women. She had worked previously at the Transfusion Inn, a notorious lesbian dive located on Southwest Front almost at water level. The reports noted that it was frequented almost entirely by women who “dress like men, act like men, and are believed to be from areas outside Portland.” Owner Edna Jordal was a widow at the time of the Portland City Council hearings in December 1964. This storefront (address since renumbered), once a tavern, was fingered in the 1964 vice reports of Chief of Police McNamara as being a lesbian hangout. Some locations included here have only the old address number available, because the building had been demolished by the time of the 1931 ordinance. The ordinance creating the change was adopted in October 1931, effective April 1, 1933. Note that, in 1931, the City of Portland underwent a massive renumbering of city addresses, with even some street names changing. Special thanks to the Oregon Historical Society, which provided many of the images in this guide, and to the Gay and Lesbian Archives of the Pacific Northwest for its financial support. Hart, transgender novelist and physician, see The Incredible Life and Loves of the Legendary Lucille Hart (1976) and Jonathan Katz’s Gay/Lesbian Almanac (1983).įor additional information about these historic locations and others in Oregon and in the U.S., see: The Queerest Places: A National Guide to Gay and Lesbian Historic Sites (Henry Holt Co., New York, 1997). Tom Cook from a lecture and paper (“Queans, Fruiters and Men of that Kind: The Portland Vice Clique Scandal of 1912”) presented in October 1998 at the Washington State History Museum’s Do Ask, Do Tell: Conference on Outing Pacific Northwest History, Tacoma, WA, as well as continuing research since that date.įor additional information of the life of Dr. Information on the 1912 vice scandal in Portland comes from the research of Mr. of Justice consisting of 800 pages of investigative reports and personal correspondence (all her letters from San Quentin prison were copied for a period of several months) from the National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland. Federal censuses, and the Marie Equi files from the Dept. For information on sites associated with Marie Equi and Harriet Speckart, we relied on Portland city directories for the years 1906-1920, the 19 U.S. Secondary sources include the first written account of Portland’s gay history in William Holman’s “A Gay History: Lest We Forget,” (The Northwest Gay Review, Special Issue, June 1977), hereinafter referred to simply as “Holman,” and Duane Frye’s account of The Music Hall from the Gay Pride Program of 1993. This guide to historic gay, lesbian, and transgender buildings and locations in Downtown Portland borrows from a number of primary sources, including Minutes of the Portland City Council, Oregon Liquor Control Commission records, Portland city directories, Sanborn fire insurance maps, and several early gay newspapers published in the city between 19 (The Fountain, The NW Fountain, The Northwest Gay Review, and The Cascade Voice).