Two doors west, on the second floor of what was once the Park Masonic Hall, a man named Sanford Kellman opened a disco called the I-Beam on October 17, 1977.
The Haight needed a venue. Disco was rising. Kellman built out a dance floor, a sound system, and a long bar. Within two years the I-Beam had pivoted away from straight disco and become the city’s most important new wave and punk venue. The Cure played the I-Beam. Echo and the Bunnymen played the I-Beam. Shriekback, Public Image Ltd., Modern English, Wire, Killing Joke, the Replacements, R.E.M., Nick Cave, and dozens of others played it on their first U.S. tours. By the late 1980s the I-Beam was also running weekly hip-hop nights, weekly goth nights, and one of the country’s first regular acid-house nights.
The I-Beam closed in 1994. The Sex Pistols had played their final show at Bill Graham’s Winterland Ballroom (Post and Steiner, not the Haight) on January 14, 1978, three months after the I-Beam opened. The two venues bookend the punk era in San Francisco: Winterland for the end of the British invasion, the I-Beam for the rise of the American post-punk underground that followed.
The Park Masonic building is still standing. The second floor is still up there. You can stand on the sidewalk and look up.