Twin Peaks Tavern

Twin Peaks Tavern is marked by its expansive, full-length plate glass windows that open the interior to the intersection of Castro and Market Streets. Housed in a building first constructed in eighteen eighty-three with a nineteen twenty-three Mediterranean revival facade, the tavern opened as a neighborhood pub in nineteen thirty-five. By the early nineteen seventies, most gay bars in the United States operated with blacked-out windows to protect the anonymity of their patrons from a society where being seen in such an establishment could result in job loss or social ostracism.