The Nevada Club

250 Eddy St. | map |

Opening: This venue evidently began running "Underground" films in the early 1970s, keeping the Nevada Club name on the building even though the tavern called that had closed in 1972. As a tavern, the business at 250 had used that name since at least 1946. The location was mid-block on the north side of the street between Taylor and Jones. This photo is from the Jack Tillmany collection. He comments: 

"Thanks to Tom Gray for another entry in the endless array of porno pits. The Nevada Club first got press in 1968 during the topless / bottomless dancers pandemic." 

 

Gary Parks comments on the architecture: 

 

"Speaking of tucked away! This Nevada Club entrance cracks me up. They took a building which looks all the world like a little nickelodeon front, and squeezed a bookstore and theatre into and behind a pre-existing liquor store. And if that weren’t enough, the amount and placement of signage harks back to the actual nickelodeon fronts of decades earlier. Some people call it trashy. I call it charm."

Peter M. Field, our pre-eminent historian of the Tenderloin district, comments on the photo:

"I took a close look at the Tom Gray photo and the rear half of the muscle car in the J & J Parking Systems lot was a clue that takes the dating of the photo to the early 1970s. So I checked the city directories, and sure 'nuff, the J & J Parking lot at 274 Eddy (next door to the Nevada Club) doesn’t appear until 1975 and goes only through 1980. 

"The two vacant period listings in the city directories for the 250 Eddy Street Nevada Club site were 1973-1974 and 1976-1977. So, it looks like what happened is the Nevada Club XXX joint opened after the Nevada Club tavern closed (last listing in 1972), giving a date range for the photograph of roughly 1973-1974 or 1976-1977, more likely the earlier range. A likely explanation for the Nevada Club XXX joint not being listed in the SF city directories or in the SF phone books is it may have been like a number of porno shop clams that opened and shut so fast that they never made it into any of the editions."

 

An extract from the Tom Gray photo. Jack comments: 

"I have provided this detail of the instructions posted out front, to advise as to what you would find inside."

Site history: 

An early photo of the block, provenance unknown, from the Glenn Koch collection. Thanks to Peter Field for making it available. 

Peter has researched the history:

"The photo shows what the block looked like sometime between 1876 and 1883. The lot on which the Nevada Club later stood is the residence just this side of the Adventist Church (the house that's slightly more set back from the street than the ones this side of it). The block didn't start changing into a part of the Tenderloin until after the Republican Wigwam (a Republican meeting and rally hall built on the northeast corner of Eddy and Jones) morphed into several theaters and was finally remodeled into the pre-1906 Alhambra Theater.

"The Nevada Club structure was built in 1922 by architects Meyer & Johnson and was one of those post-1906 earthquake and fire narrow-front one-story and basement concrete and rebar structures made for storefronts, frequently divided into two even narrower storefronts as this one was—246 and 250 Eddy.

"Looking up the SF Chronicle under 246 Eddy and 250 Eddy yielded the following: there was a cigar store at 250 Eddy in 1923, and another cigar store called Bud’s Place at 246 Eddy in 1937 that fronted a bookie joint that got raided during the time of the Atherton investigation. There was Ye Olde Barbeque Restaurant at 250 Eddy in 1924 that was raided that year as part of a saloon abatement drive by the police. In 1933 the North Beach Business Men’s Club at 250 Eddy was one of several speakeasies that got raided.

"Conchita’s Adobe House Mexican restaurant operated at 250 Eddy in 1935. As the Adobe Club in 1938 it was raided by the morals squad, meaning B-girls and prostitutes were working the place. In 1942 it was raided by the Army and Navy and declared off limits, with MPs stationed by the entrance because soldiers and sailors were getting dosed with venereal diseases from picking up girls there. The brief newspaper report mentioned the five women arrested in the place were dressed in male attire.

 

"In 1946 the Nevada Club bar at 250 Eddy got raided for food law complaints. In 1968 the Nevada Club advertised for topless go-go girls. 1964 was when Carol Doda started the topless craze at the Condor Club on Broadway and Columbus in SF, and after that topless bars were all the rage and everyone was hiring topless dancers and cocktail waitresses. It was listed in the city directories as a tavern from 1946 through 1972.

 

"The Nevada Club XXX bookstore and film venue shown in the photograph was never listed as such in the city directories. After 1972 the 250 address alternated being vacant for a couple of years at a time with listings like a pizza shop, an ice cream parlor, and a smoke shop run by a Kensington family (a very expensive Marin County bedroom community), one Martha Jawad and her sons, that also operated a pawn shop across the street. Meanwhile, the Downtown Liquor Store at 246 Eddy was a much more stable business, launched and operated by Namitallah E. Mogannam from 1953-1961, then by Sam Wong from 1962-1982."

Closing: It's unknown when the adult business using the Nevada Club name closed, perhaps 1974. 

Status: It's gone. Peter Field notes: 

"The building was demolished as part of the construction of Boedekker Park on the adjacent northeast corner of Eddy and Jones in 1985.

More information: Thanks to Peter Field for his research. For a fine history of the neighborhood see his 2018 Arcadia Publishing book "The Tenderloin District of San Francisco Through Time." It's available through Amazon. 

Jack Tillmany's Arcadia Publishing book "Theatres of San Francisco" can be previewed on Google Books. It's available from Amazon or your local bookseller.  

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