Lion’s Den Will Be Chinatown’s First New Nightclub and Live Music Venue in Decades
The bar aims to bring back the glamour of 1940s San Francisco Chinatown, the heyday of the Chinese-American bar-nightclub
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By the time Steven Lee arrived in San Francisco’s Chinatown during the mid-1970s, he was coming onto a scene that was already dying. It’s not that Chinatown wasn’t still full of bustling shops and vibrant neighborhood restaurants. It was. But in the 1940s and 1950s, Chinatown had also been one of the city’s great nightlife destinations, where Chinese-American nightclubs with names like Forbidden City and Chinese Sky Room would put on floor shows spectacles of song and dance that attracted tourists from around the country, as well as A-list celebrities like Frank Sinatra and Ronald Reagan.