The Tool Box was a gay men’s leather bar in San Francisco’s South of Market, and it lasted nine years. It opened in 1962 on the east corner of 4th Street and Harrison Street, the first leather bar in SOMA, and it closed in 1971. In that short run it gathered early figures of the San Francisco leather scene. A mainstream magazine then turned “leather” from a small taste into a national image. The bar’s pictures and its people also point straight at the later leather strip on Folsom Street.
Life magazine, 26 June 1964
On 26 June 1964 Life ran the cover story “Homosexuality in America.” It opened with a two-page spread of photographs by Bill Eppridge: leather-clad patrons standing under a mural. The piece pushed San Francisco toward the national idea of a gay capital, and it made The Tool Box look like the leather bar in the public mind. For men in conservative towns who were tired of the era’s “effeminate” cliché, the issue worked like an invitation.
Bill Ruquy, a part owner, told the magazine the bar had a strict dress code. Tennis shoes and other clothes that did not read as biker wear were not allowed in. The stress on a masculine subculture made the magazine, without meaning to, an advertisement for leather, and it fed gay liberation. Jack Fritscher, in the 1991 anthology Leatherfolk, called that issue an image-liberating historical issue, read across the country as an invitation to come to San Francisco and be a man’s man.
Chuck Arnett’s Marlboro wall
Chuck Arnett made the room’s famous decoration, a set of oversized black-and-white murals. In 1962 he painted four panels: two on the south wall toward Harrison Street, two on the west-facing glass storefront toward 4th Street. The figures are tough men — sailors, bikers, businessmen, construction workers — captioned “Marlboro Country…,” a row of Marlboro cowboys. In the 1960s he also painted wood-panel replicas. One was given to the GLBT Historical Society archive in 2021. A figure in the painting has been identified as the biker and photographer Joe Winters.
After the bar closed, SOMA redevelopment demolished the building. During the long demolition and construction, one wall with two mural panels stayed almost intact for years, still facing the sidewalk. The GLBT Historical Society kept photographs. In 2012 Nayland Blake remade the murals for the exhibition “FREE!LOVE!TOOL!BOX!” at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. A reproduction now hangs long-term in the South of Market Leather History Alley.
From Harrison to Folsom
From 1965 the social and sexual center of San Francisco leather moved toward Folsom Street. Febe’s became the best-known of the bars that followed. The Tool Box crowd moved with the map. Jack H., owner of Detour and the Slot, later became a co-owner of Febe’s. Artist Mike Caffee designed Febe’s logo and made a statue for that bar. Members of the Satyrs Motorcycle Club of Los Angeles, the oldest gay motorcycle club in the United States, were in and out of The Tool Box. Those people tied the early SOMA scene to the bar owners and the street fairs that came later on Folsom.
In August 1975 Drummer ran “Requiem for a toolbox” in its second volume, on the demolition. Readers at the time took the closing as a chapter of leather history, not as one more nightclub shutting. The building is gone, and the mural wall went with the concrete, but the alley markers and the archive still show what the bar was: a dress code that banned tennis shoes, Marlboro men on the walls, motorcycle-club regulars, and a mainstream magazine that told a generation where the men’s men drank.
