Last Call on Halloween: Why L.A.’s Beloved Bars Are Closing on the Same Night

LOS ANGELES — Halloween in this city has always been a beginning. It is the night the shy become fabulous, the night West Hollywood fills Santa Monica Boulevard, the night a costume buys you a new personality until sunrise. This year, for a striking number of Los Angeles rooms, it is also an ending.

In Pasadena, the only gay bar in town is scheduled to pour its last drink on Halloween unless a sale comes through. In Santa Monica, a party mansion that ran for two decades has booked its final party for Oct. 31. In Silver Lake, a Latinx-owned, queer-led bar that traces its lineage to 1973 is due out of its building on Nov. 1. Line them up and you get a calendar no promoter would choose: the biggest costume night of the year doubling as a wake.

The question LAist asked

The spark for this piece came from LAist’s AirTalk. On Oct. 19, LAist asked why the Southern California gay bar scene “isn’t what it used to be,” and talked with Joseph Hawkins, former director of the ONE Archives at the USC Libraries. His diagnosis was structural.

Masses of people who can go to a bar and sustain it over a long period of time has become more and more difficult.

— Joseph Hawkins, to LAist’s AirTalk

“Some bars don’t have the clientele that they used to because of the internet,” Hawkins said. Then he offered a turn that gives the segment its title: “Maybe we’re not losing gay bars; what we’re doing is opening up other spaces where gay people can be included.”

Hold on to that sentence. It is the most hopeful thing anyone said about Los Angeles nightlife this month, and it is also, if you are a 69-year-old bar owner in Pasadena, the most painful.

Pasadena: “Right now it’s 50-50”

The Boulevard sits at 3199 E. Foothill Blvd. Visit Pasadena calls it the city’s only gay bar, and it is scheduled to close on Halloween unless owner Steven Terradot can complete a deal to sell it to a new operator, Pasadena Now reported on Oct. 17. Terradot put the odds plainly: “Right now it’s 50-50.”

“I’m going to be 70 next May, and I’ve been doing this for a long time,” he said. “I have over 40 years in the bar between bartending and owning it, and it’s just time to move on.” He leases the building and owns the liquor license, and said the bar could continue “if the landlord is able to work out a lease that’s beneficial to all parties.” So far, he said, that hasn’t happened.

The bar has outlasted other Pasadena gay bars, including Encounters, Copa and Nardis, and survived the pandemic shutdown, when a regular started a GoFundMe in 2021 seeking $50,000 to keep it open (same source). Visit Pasadena says it was established in 1979. (Other local coverage gives a different founding year, so treat the exact date with care.)

What Terradot said next is the whole debate in miniature. “It’s given a safe place, I hope, for people in our community where they can go and be themselves without fear of being mistreated or even attacked.” And: “The world’s changed a lot. A lot of our young people go to straight bars or go to other places. They don’t have to stay just in a gay bar. So we’d like to keep a safe place, but there also has to be a demand for it.”

Hawkins and Terradot are describing the same change from opposite ends. To the historian, a younger generation that feels welcome everywhere is a victory. To the owner, it is an empty Tuesday. The staff is down to “two part-time bartenders,” Terradot said, and the drag performers “lose their Friday night and their weekends here.” His last line was almost cheerful: “Well, the final night will be Halloween, so we should be jam packed.”

Silver Lake: “It has to remain in the neighborhood”

Across town, El Condor tells the rent side of the story. The Silver Lake bar started as El Conquistador in 1973, and through its many names it has stayed Latinx-owned and queer-led, the Los Angeles Blade reported in September. The original owners sold in 2013 because of high rent, and current owner Dustin Lancaster is now giving up the lease. The Blade reported the bar would close at the end of October and vacate on Nov. 1.

“A lot of people call it gentrification,” Lancaster told the Blade. “As buildings, commercial spaces, and homes are bought and sold, those prices just come up. And for a lot of the working people, it becomes unsustainable.”

But El Condor is not giving up the idea. “The goal is to have it live on in a different space — but it will certainly be in Silver Lake,” Lancaster said. “By the time we get to October 31st, we should be able to announce where the next location is, and where people can continue to support and love the space that they’ve loved for the last 52 years.” (Some later neighborhood listings give an earlier closing date; we are going by the Blade’s reporting and will update when a new address is announced.)

West Hollywood: the cocktail bar that couldn’t outrun the math

The closures are not only queer bars, and they are not only old ones. Employees Only, the celebrated cocktail bar, opened in West Hollywood in 2018 and served its final night on Sunday, Sept. 27, Los Angeles Magazine reported. Tom Sopit, speaking for the bar, pointed to inflation, the cost of goods, the minimum wage and GLP-1 weight-loss drugs.

His most striking line was about the city’s main industry: “The film industry has completely left our city, so those budgets have disappeared.” And then, an unusually candid admission from an operator: “I’m hoping that the new era…I unfortunately did not have the answer for it.” The bar auctioned its neon sign, with proceeds going to staff (same source).

Santa Monica: from party mansion to family club

Then there is The Victorian. For 20 years the Main Street mansion was one of the Westside’s best-known party venues. Its final party is set for Oct. 31, and the Los Angeles Times reported the operators owed $278,094 in back rent. The Times placed it in a run of Santa Monica losses: Misfit closed in April after 15 years, and the Britannia Pub closed in July after about 30.

What replaces it is the tell. Under a deal the City Council approved unanimously on March 24, the city-owned building will reopen as The Santa Monican, a family membership club run by the same operators, Garner Gerson and Adir Tal, with up to 20% of memberships offered free and an opening targeted for mid-2028, the City of Santa Monica announced on Oct. 9. City Manager Oliver Chi’s explanation was blunt: “their nightlife model had run its course.”

Read that phrase twice. It is the closest thing to an official obituary that Los Angeles nightlife has received this year. The building survives. The night does not.

The drinking numbers behind it

Underneath the rent and the regulars is a national change in habits. Only 54% of U.S. adults now say they drink alcohol, a record low in Gallup’s polling, and 17% say they have substituted nonalcoholic drinks, according to a Gallup survey of about 1,200 adults conducted July 1 to 19 and published in August.

A bar’s business model is drinks. When fewer people drink, and the ones who do drink less, the bars with the highest rent and the narrowest audience feel it first. Then there are the creative rooms that never ran on volume at all: Intercrew, the Koreatown supper club and live venue that LA Local called an “essential spot” for Asian American creatives, closed at the end of February after five years.

Our take: the night is being rebuilt, not erased

It is tempting to write this as a eulogy. We are not going to. Read the four stories together and a pattern appears that is more interesting than decline.

• The old model was a room that sold drinks to a loyal crowd that came for identity, safety and each other. It depended on volume, cheap rent and an audience with nowhere else to go.
• The new model charges for belonging up front: memberships, ticketed nights, pop-ups, sober parties, members clubs. The Victorian becoming The Santa Monican is the cleanest example in the region.
• The gap is everyone the new model prices out. That includes the drag performer who loses her Friday, the bartender who loses his shifts, and the 22-year-old who cannot afford a membership but still needs a door to walk through.

Hawkins may be right that “other spaces” are opening. But spaces are not the same as institutions. The Boulevard has been somewhere people could “be themselves without fear,” in Terradot’s words, for decades. A rotating pop-up cannot promise that. A bar with a neon sign and a regular bartender can.

What you can do before Oct. 31

If this city wants these rooms, the most effective policy is a Friday night. Go to The Boulevard before Halloween. Ask El Condor where it is going next. Tip the drag performers in cash. And if you have the means and the know-how Terradot is looking for, he has said publicly that he is talking to buyers.

For our part, Nightlife Report will keep a running record of every Los Angeles room that closes, sells or reinvents itself this season, from Halloween to Valentine’s Day. That 106-day stretch is the busiest season this city has, and we explain why in From Halloween to Valentine’s Day. The night is not over. It is being rebuilt, and someone has to write down who it leaves out.

Own or work in an L.A. bar, club or venue that is closing, selling or reinventing itself? Tell us. Tips: editor@nightlifereport.app.

Sources

1. LAist, Faheem Khan, AirTalk, “The Southern California gay bar scene isn’t what it used to be. There might be a silver lining,” Oct. 19, 2026: laist.com
2. Pasadena Now, Therese Edu, “Pasadena’s Only Gay Bar, The Boulevard, Faces Oct. 31 Closing,” Oct. 17, 2026: pasadenanow.com
3. Los Angeles Blade, Joel Medina, “LGBTQ+ friendly bar El Condor will close its doors after a decade of community,” Sept. 5, 2026: losangelesblade.com
4. Los Angeles Magazine, Taylor Parise, “Employees Only Is Closing,” Sept. 17, 2026: lamag.com
5. Los Angeles Times, Ella Chakarian, Santa Monica party mansion set to shut down, Oct. 8, 2026: latimes.com
6. City of Santa Monica press release, Oct. 9, 2026: santamonica.gov
7. Gallup, “Americans’ Drinking Remains at Record Low,” August 2026: news.gallup.com
8. LA Local, Koreatown’s Intercrew closure: thelalocal.org

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