LGBTQ+

America's first great Black LGBTQ+ discotheque still fills its dance floors on Pico Boulevard. Catch One - for 42 years Jewel's Catch One - occupies a 1925 Mediterranean Revival building at 4067 West Pico Boulevard in Arlington Heights, Los Angeles. Jewel Thais-Williams, a UCLA history graduate turned entrepreneur, opened the club in 1973 after being turned away from West Hollywood clubs for being Black and a woman; a state law then barred women from tending bar unless they owned the venue, so she raised the money and bought the building outright - by some accounts becoming the first Black lesbian to own a bar in the United States. What she built is widely considered the first large-scale disco in the country to serve and operate within the Black LGBTQ+ community: three dance floors and three bars across two levels, an upstairs main floor with a stage and a lower level for weekly themed parties. At its "Studio 54 of the West" peak the guest list ran from Sylvester, Donna Summer, Luther Vandross and Rick James to Whitney Houston, Janet Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Sammy Davis Jr. and Madonna, while the rooms doubled as meeting space for political organising. The club survived relentless police raids, neighbourhood hostility and a devastating fire. Its compassion matched its glamour: at the height of the AIDS epidemic, Jewel and her wife Rue Thais-Williams opened Rue's House in the same building in 1989, providing services to women and children living with HIV/AIDS - one strand of a community-health legacy that later included the Village Health Foundation clinic next door. Thais-Williams closed and sold the club in July 2015 - "it was ours, but it's time to move on," she told the Los Angeles Times - and new owners Steve and Mitch Edelson reopened it, briefly as Union, then restored the Catch One name. Today it operates as a multi-room electronic, hip-hop and live music venue, the intersection outside is officially Jewel Thais-Williams Square, and the founder's 2025 passing at 86 was mourned nationally as the loss of the woman who built queer Black joy a home.

Type: NightClub

Address: 4067 West Pico Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA, United States, 90019

Minimum Age: 21

Opening Date: 01/01/1973