The historical marker outside the Condor Club in North Beach commemorates Carol Doda and 1964. It says nothing about the white grand piano on a hydraulic lift, or November 1983, or the bouncer who died on it.

The historical marker at 560 Broadway in North Beach handles the essentials: Carol Doda, the monokini, June 19, 1964 — the night the Condor Club made international headlines by inventing a genre. What the marker doesn't mention is the piano.

For nineteen years, according to Darren Mckeeman's account in his newsletter Long Wharf, the club's central visual was a white grand piano on a hydraulic lift that lowered a dancer from the ceiling. The audience looked up. The physics of the situation took care of the rest. The piano worked through California's 1972 crackdown on full nudity in bars, through Doda's entire tenure in the spotlight — and then, in November 1983, it stopped working without incident.

Mckeeman reports that bouncer Jimmy Ferrozzo and dancer Theresa Hill were on the platform after closing, using it for purposes management had apparently never needed to specifically prohibit. One of them hit the switch. The platform takes approximately ninety seconds to travel from floor to ceiling — not quite enough time to recognize what was happening and get clear. Ferrozzo was on the bottom. He died. Hill survived. A busboy found them in the morning. A police report of the incident exists, Mckeeman notes; he leaves it to the reader's imagination.

Doda was still dancing at the Condor when it happened, per Mckeeman. She continued for two more years. The piano was apparently serviced. The club ran another seventeen years before finally closing in 2000.

It reopened. Of course it reopened. It has been a sports bar and a seafood restaurant, and since 2007 it has been the Condor Club again — still at 560 Broadway, still in the Broadway Neighborhood Commercial District. SAW Entertainment Ltd., whose principal is Joseph Carouba, has held the building since 1990, according to the city's Legacy Business filing. In 2022, at the nomination of District 3 Supervisor Aaron Peskin, the city enrolled the Condor in its Legacy Business Registry under file LBR-2019-20-036. The staff analysis cited the club's "association with San Francisco entertainment history and the proliferation of topless dancing in the United States." No mention of the piano.

The Legacy Business Registry is not a historical record so much as a civic endorsement — a program that offers rent subsidies and business grants to places the city would prefer to keep around. What file LBR-2019-20-036 records is that 560 Broadway has housed the Condor since 1958 and that Carol Doda made headlines on a June night in 1964. What it doesn't record is that the club's physical centerpiece stood at the scene of a man's death.

Walk by tonight: the sign at Broadway and Columbus still reads "San Francisco's Original Gentlemen's Club" — technically accurate, as Mckeeman puts it, if you're flexible about the word "gentlemen." The marker covers 1964. The piano is long gone, and when exactly it was removed, or what took its place, isn't in any public record I could find.