In 1973, the bar was hit by three of the four fires that would burn the place.
When other bars started to do the same, Toad Hall became the first in the Castro to install a music system and hire a DJ. At a time when bar music was limited to juke boxes, the owners decided to control the music by creating mixed tapes with a carefully-planned set list of songs. It was the first gay bar in the neighborhood to allow dancing – at least for a time until the police noticed they didn’t have a dance permit. Jason Phillips, a local artist, painted a mural depicting Toad’s adventures that was hung on the wall behind the bar. The bar was instead named Toad Hall after the home of one of the characters from Kenneth Grahame’s 1908 children’s book The Wind in the Willows, an awkward character who never felt at ease with the other characters – a nod to the homosexual undertones some believe the book to have, and, because of the toadstool on the bar’s shingle, perhaps also to psilocybin mushrooms. Tom Sanford had a metal statue of a nun and had hoped to call the bar The Iron Nun, but one of the landlords, a pharmacist at Star Pharmacy next door (where the first notices of a “gay cancer” hitting the Castro would be posted in 1981) named Eugene Longinotti, who was a devout member of Most Holy Redeemer Parish, was willing to accept a gay bar for a tenant but not one whose name sounded so blasphemous.
(The Lion’s Pub still exists, but gradually stopped being a gay bar sometime in the early 2000s.) It was one of four gay bars that year to join the three other gay bars that already existed in the Castro.
Toad Hall opened on May 28, 1971, Memorial Day weekend, by four gay men and a woman – Ron Estes and David Monroe of the Lion’s Pub, a gay “sweater” bar at Sacramento and Divisadero that opened in 1969, with Tom Sanford and Sam Hall, along with the financial support of Marjorie Deremer, a well-off senior citizen who passed away in 2000. Status: No longer a bar History Summary Nameĭetails The original Toad Hall, a Castro neighborhood gay bar in the 1970s.