Great American Music Hall at 119: from post-quake men's club to Sally Rand's Music Box to the Grateful Dead

Step inside the Great American Music Hall on O'Farrell Street and the room hardly looks like a Tenderloin rock club. There are marble columns, wraparound balconies and painted ceilings. The 700-capacity hall has been an entertainment venue for more than a century, and the Psyched! Fest and Substance Festival shows on its current calendar are only the latest chapter.

Blanco's

The building at 859 O'Farrell went up in 1907, during the rebuilding after the 1906 earthquake and fire. A city Legacy Business Registry report says it was purpose-built as a private men's club called Blanco's Cafe, designed by architect A.W. Edelman in a Renaissance and Baroque-influenced style. The name is often linked to a notorious Barbary Coast brothel.

Sally Rand's Music Box

In the late 1930s, burlesque star Sally Rand, famous for her fan and bubble dances, took over the hall and renamed it the Music Box. The city report says she hosted burlesque and music shows there until 1946. After World War II, the building housed the Cotton Club, which had one of the city's earliest mixed-race house bands. Later came restaurants and the Loyal Order of the Moose, and a long decline that nearly ended in demolition.

The Great American era

In 1972, Tom Bradshaw and Sam Duval refurbished the hall and reopened it as the Great American Music Hall. Jazz greats including Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie, Stan Getz and Bill Evans played early bills there. In 1974, Journey's new lineup debuted on its stage. Jerry Garcia played the room about 30 times, and the Grateful Dead recorded One from the Vault at an invitation-only show in August 1975.

Its live recordings fill a shelf: Billy Joel in 1975, Ry Cooder's Show Time in 1976, Sonny Rollins' Don't Stop the Carnival in 1978 and Betty Carter's The Audience with Betty Carter in 1979. Robin Williams filmed his 1982 HBO special there. A dot-com company bought the hall in 2000, and in 2013 a Rolling Stone poll of artists and managers ranked it the sixth-best rock club in America.

A legacy business

San Francisco added the hall to its Legacy Business Registry in 2017. The city noted its role as the home of Noise Pop shows and local Latin rock and country-Americana series, and as a rental space for proms and weddings. Its exterior is a contributor to the Uptown Tenderloin Historic District, and the city's LGBTQ historic context statement mentions it as a venue for Lily Tomlin.