Dayton gay bars

I do suspect, and this is just speculation, that the levee was a place of assignation, a cruising spot. Perhaps this location: …which appears in the New Dayton Illustrated This would be the levee wrapping around downtown from Wilkinson Street to the west and south down to 4th or 5th. Outdoor cruising spots have been pretty common in gay history: famous ones were Hempstead Heath in London, the Siegesaule Victory Column in the Berlin Tiergarten, and the square in front of the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow.

In Ohio pioneer gay bar Edmund White mentions the old, pre-urban renewal Fountain Square as gay cruising spot and pick-up place in his early semi-autobigoraphical fiction And for Dayton, it might have been this tree shaded promenade, which might have been more a meeting place rather than a sex space. Another thing that leads me to think this was the orginal Levee is that nearby Robert Boulevard was a place of residence for gay men.

No supposition here as there is documenation of tis as a place of assignation. Cooper Park appeared in a collection of coming-out stories, where one of his authors mentioned his first encounter was arranged here, with a local educator either a principle or school board member.

The landscaping in these pix is somewhat sparse, but by the s and 30s it was probably much more lush City of Bachelors: Single Men Downtown Cooper Park might have been equivilant to Bughouse Square and Pershing Square as it and the levee was in an area of rooming houses and small apartments and cheap hotels, the other side of downtown Dayton.

A close-up with some references. Note, though, that dayton lot of these roomers were single woman, as there was a big rooming house or hotel for single Catholic country girls come to work in the city, in that quadrant northwest of Main Street. But there were a lot of apartments and perhaps residential hotels downtown.

The most famous was the Arcade, but there were others, like these two on the Courthouse Square block Atlas Hotel and Ratterman Apartments. One can easily see this bar of gay apartments and single room occupancies giving cover to a gay demimonde. The buildings are on the lower left hand corner. The Latin Lounge, on the ground floor of a parking garage click on the image to enlarge.

The Gay Lounge opened in the early s, say or Dayton gay slang…the lost language of queens. But the yellow pages of does list it as having live music. The name change happened after a brutal murder or gay bashing associated with a Latin Lounge pick-up gone wrong. There was an earlier Stage Door in Dayton, but it was in the Mayfair Burlesque building, and as far as I know has no relation to this name change.

The Stage Door remained on 2nd until the early s, when urban renewal demolition for Courthouse Square forced the location to change to Jefferson Streetwhere it remains today.

Dayton LGBTQ City Guide

You can tell where the place was by the porthole windows: image from the unfortunatly out-of-print Dayton Sketchbook, which was one of the better books on the city The odd name was because this was a Korean Karate studio before it became a bar, and I guess the owner decided to keep the name as cover or because it sounded exotic, like a tiki bar.

The place was a piano bar, and the piano player, Harry, was also the doorman at the Stage Door in later years. The Martinique started out as a cocktail lounge on Salem Avenue, between the bridge and Grand Avenue, opening in Presumably it served the singles who were living in the new apartments buildings in Grafton Hill.

And perhaps those bars attracted a gay population, too. There was an ownership dayton in or 71, and after that gay place turned gay. It was in a converted old house when I moved here, but I am not sure if that was the original location.