The Tenderloin Museum and the Black Cat present an evening in recognition of the centennial anniversary of the Tenderloin vice district closures of 1917, on February 15, 2017 from 5:30 pm - 1 am. Join us for an evening of live entertainment at the Black Cat and celebrate 100 years of resistance to traditional social mores in the Tenderloin.

The historical efforts by reformers to close and establish a “moral” alliance in the heart of the Tenderloin, denying working women and their patrons essential freedoms and protections concluded with a neighborhood wide closure of bars and bordellos (including the original Black Cat) on February 15, 1917. Having closed down San Francisco’s notorious Barbary Coast for good in 1913, reformers assumed that they had also won a thorough cleanup of the Tenderloin once and for all. Only a few short years after reformers declared victory, the Tenderloin came back stronger than ever. The 1917 campaign would be the first of many establishment attacks on the Tenderloin’s challenge to traditional social values. 

Open to the public. Bar is first come, first served. To make a reservation for dining: www.opentable.com/r/black-cat-san-francisco

“...the Uptown Tenderloin from 1907...was one of the nation’s most dynamic and forward-thinking urban neighborhoods. It was San Francisco's leading home for independent, working women. The Uptown Tenderloin afforded them the opportunity to live out a liberating new vision for male-female...Reformers seeking to ‘close down’ the Uptown Tenderloin had a much broader agenda than shuttering bordellos and clamping down on prostitution. The city’s establishment also wanted to completely transform the neighborhood's values. It wanted to turn the Uptown Tenderloin into a place that no longer challenged traditional Victorian morals.”  -The Tenderloin: Sex, Crime and Resistance in the Heart of San Francisco, Randy Shaw