Lion Pub, a San Francisco gay bar that closed in 2016 after 48 years, has been reinvented as a $5.995 million single-family home.
The Victorian building in the city’s affluent Pacific Heights neighborhood hit the market last week. It housed the bar from 1968 until its closure two years ago following the death of its owner, Kelly Ellis. More recently, the bar had catered to more of a straight clientele, following the decline of the "gayborhood," according to local news reports.
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"The Lion has gone through a lot of changes since its opening 20 years ago," Ellis said to the Bay Area Reporter in 1989. "We've gone from preppy bar to a dance bar to a hippie bar to leather and back to preppy."
Now, onto residential.
"It was a building that hadn’t been touched in 50 years," said Tim Murphy of Tim Murphy Design Associates, who purchased the building in March 2017 for $3.5 million from Ellis’s estate, PropertyShark records show.
"We would have loved to preserve more of the bar, but it was in such bad shape it wasn't possible," Mr. Murphy said. They did keep a lion-stained glass window though, now on display outside. One of themost important things found, Murphy said,was theRolodex-likedrink menu.
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The transformation took less than a year to complete, Mr. Murphy added. Now the 4,809-square-foot residence on Divisadero Street has four bedrooms, an au-pair suite, four-and-a-half bathrooms and preserved original details like the facade, the home’s fireplaces, the staircase and a skylight.
There are also walnut floors and 11-foot-high ceilings, according to the listing with Ron Abta and Brett Jones of Paragon Real Estate Group, who did not respond to request for comment.
Curbed first reported the listing.