By Peter Lawrence Kane
It’s been four months since the Lexington Club announced its impending closure, but now owner Lila Thirkield has confirmed a date: April 30. According to Inside Scoop, the space will be taken over by the PlumpJack Group. PlumpJack, if you’re not familiar, is an upscale club-and-resort company founded by Lt. Governor (and former SF mayor) Gavin Newsom. The company will also take over Sloane (which has bottle service like PlumpJack’s other clubs, although the Lex is probably too small to make that work).
As the Lex occupies the same block as Hog & Rocks and the much feted Lazy Bear, a lot of 19th Street’s clientele has probably looked on it as a glaring anachronism for some time. While the announcement of the Lex’s demise triggered mixed emotions, San Francisco will essentially be left with only five-eighths of a lesbian bar, the always wonderful — but not especially dyke-centric — Wild Side West, and that’s just freaking wrong.
Although PlumpJack owns the Balboa Café and MatrixFillmore, it’s not entirely accurate to call the company “Marina-centric” when it also operates wineries and inns in Tahoe and Napa (but we all know what Uptown Almanac meant by that). Regardless, any nightlife empire that refers to its bars as “properties” is kind of suspect. The Lexington Club was never a property. It was (and is) a really fun dive, and although it’s not my place to pen an official eulogy, I’ve always had a great time there.
Remember in 2008 when then-mayor Newsom crowed about the California Supreme Court’s impending legalization of same-sex marriage (“It’s coming, whether you like it or not!”), a boast that his opponents later replayed in their TV ads? Right now, that’s all I can hear in my head. The Lex is getting replaced by a guy with slicked-back hair, and an endless chain of black Uber SUVs idling outside whether you like it or not.
[via Inside Scoop; photo courtesy of Matthew Rutledge/Flickr]
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