2025.0214-Add-001...

These first two images are not from the article. I dug them up because it's a neat building...

1911

Almost nobody remembers one of San Francisco's worst betrayals

A building on Polk Street has a problem. California Hall, which sits on the corner of Turk and Polk streets, blends in with the other boxy brick buildings that crowd the neigh­bor­hood. It looks ornate and vaguely historic, but so do most old Tenderloin buildings. It was built in the 1910s as a meeting hall for Polk Street’s German community; in the 1960s it served as a concert venue (the Grateful Dead played there in 1969); now, it’s part of the campus of Academy of Art University.

California Hall’s issue, according to local historians and activists, is that it’s missing a plaque.

The building was the site of a forgotten flash point of San Francisco’s LGBTQ+ history — a moment when a group of Protestant ministers struck up an unlikely but rock-solid alliance with San Francisco’s gay and lesbian communities. On New Year’s Eve, 1964, a dance and drag ball at the Hall ended with a police raid and arrests, which spun into a legal battle involving the ACLU. Before the Stonewall riot galvanized the gay liberation movement in 1969, and before the Compton’s Cafeteria Riot in 1966, the California Hall raid shone a light on police harassment of LGBTQ+ communities. In a 2023 article on the raid, the Guardian declared it “San Francisco’s Stonewall.”

Click on headline to read the rather long but very interesting article.