Bimbo's 365 Club at 1025 Columbus Ave. has a fair claim to being San Francisco's longest-running party. Its website calls it "San Francisco's favorite nightspot for 95 years and counting." It still books concerts and private events under the same family that opened it on Columbus Avenue in 1951. Its story actually begins with two separate clubs.

The 365 Club: a speakeasy on Market Street

Wikipedia says Agostino Giuntoli came to San Francisco from Tuscany in the 1920s and worked as a janitor at the Palace Hotel, then as a cook. His boss couldn't pronounce his name and called him "bimbo," a diminutive of the Italian word for boy. The 365 Club opened in 1931 as a speakeasy and after-hours gambling club in a third-floor loft at 365 Market St., managed by Giuntoli. A young Rita Hayworth danced in the chorus line there. The club's best-known gimmick was a mirror illusion that made a fish tank above the bar appear to hold a tiny swimming woman, billed as Dolfina, "the Girl in the Fishbowl."

The Bal Tabarin: Pflueger's Art Deco room

The building on Columbus started as the Bal Tabarin, a dance and floor-show club founded by restaurateur Bob Grison, bandleader Tom Gerun and Frank Martinelli. In 1931, ahead of the end of Prohibition, they hired architect Timothy Pflueger to design an elegant room. Wikipedia says his Moderne bar, later called Art Deco, used his patented hidden lighting, which could shift smoothly from one color to another. Once alcohol was legal again, the Bal Tabarin got California's first new liquor license. A 13-year-old Ann Miller lied about her age to dance there in 1936.

Bimbo's 365

In November 1950, Giuntoli bought the Bal Tabarin property for a reported $100,000 and merged the two clubs, opening Bimbo's 365 in 1951. He expanded the kitchen and added another bar but kept Pflueger's bar where it was. Over the next two decades the club booked Louis Prima, Xavier Cugat, Sid Caesar and Rodney Dangerfield, and by the late 1960s Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Marvin Gaye, Dionne Warwick and Neil Diamond.

After Giuntoli retired in 1970, the club was mostly limited to private rentals for 18 years. That stretch included a long 1975 run by The Tubes and a wild 1974 Stooges show. In 1988, his grandson Michael Cerchiai reopened it as a live venue, and it has since hosted acts from Chris Isaak to Adele (2008) and The Flaming Lips (2012).

Today

The club's site lists upcoming shows and says it hosts private parties and receptions for up to 685 guests and dinners for 150 to 475. San Francisco Heritage has said it nominated the club to the city's Legacy Business Registry, citing the Cerchiai family's "enduring commitment to excellence, authenticity, and community."