Distillations: The Armory Club’s shift from a kink bar to a staid metaphor for San Francisco

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The Armory Club’s name is also its epitaph. Opened by the owner of Kink.com back when the fetish porn company was head- and hindquartered in the armory building across the street, it used to be the bar at the epicenter of the Bay Area’s most visible kink scene. That was its entire purpose, and it did it well.

Now, Kink.com is gone, the armory is vacant, and The Armory Club still exists, on the corner of 14th and Mission but at the center of nothing.

The screens on the walls are not televisions: In perhaps the most perfect symbol a bar has ever provided for itself, they offer slide shows of what’s going on in the armory. Which once might have been shocking, but now is absolutely nothing. To sit in The Armory Club is to see shots of an empty warehouse wherever you turn.

This may say less about The Armory Club itself, however, and more about San Francisco: The city lost a vibrant scene, leaving behind a giant void in which nothing interesting happens. Rather than feeling bad for The Armory Club, we should perhaps feel grateful that it hasn’t already been replaced with a vegan oxygen bar. It may be shadow of itself, but a shadow is still something.

The Armory Club’s dark, neo-Victorian interior is also interesting on its own terms: The tin ceiling is elegant and the damask wallpaper is moody, and it’s a very open space, consisting of two bar areas that strongly emphasize standing room over chairs and tables. (There’s also a basement area with another bar and dance floor, though it was closed during my visit.) The walls that don’t have screens have tastefully framed prints of fairly explicit S&M art. It certainly comes across as the kind of place where archeologists of the future will find fragments of a butt plug and date it to the 2010s.

Yet as I walked in and took the measure of the place, I was struck by two competing impressions: The first is that The Armory Club was trying way too hard. The emo-gothy-electronica music was much too loud, while the décor screamed “AREN’T I ATMOSPHERIC?” in a way that expected somebody to clap. It was all so stiff for a bar that no longer has a scene with standards to hold up. A little relaxation would have served it well.

Except that I also felt like it wasn’t really trying at all. Because … and granted, I was here on an off night … there wasn’t any real attempt that I could see to actually create a bar experience that was at all different from any other neo-Victorian gothy bar in the city. Hang a few fetish pictures on their walls, and you’d have exactly the same experience. And … shouldn’t a bar carrying the honor of the ancient Kink regime’s glory days be doing something different? Doesn’t the mantle it wears impose a higher standard? It is possible to do — Wicked Grounds tries a lot harder, and it shows. Of course, Wicked Grounds has also struggled like hell to keep it together. There are no easy answers.

The question, perhaps for all of us here losing our communities piece by piece, isn’t how we win, but who our decline reveals us to be.

My sense is that The Armory Club has given up on being a living scene and is doubling down on being an ordinary cocktail bar with a slightly unusual décor which it sells as a “theme.”

Which also might be a perfect metaphor for San Francisco.

I order a “Peace Pipe” (Peleton mezcal, orange curacao, yellow chartreuse, jalapeno chili infusion, lime, orange, rocks) off the house special drink list – the drink list is almost all cocktails, with a very limited wine and beer selection – and it’s fine. It’s all right. Certainly acceptable for the $8 happy hour price.

I sat down with “Vicky,” and we talked about tea ceremonies. Apparently – I had not known this – there is an active tea ceremony scene in San Francisco. Vicky, who has studied tea ceremonies in Japan and across the country, is involved in it. She told me about the way in which it is possible to take the incredibly strict proscriptions that the ceremonies require – that napkins be folded just so, that certain cups are served with the left hand, and other with the right, that you bow exactly so far and no farther – allow you to find great freedom within them. Take all the choices away, and somehow new ones, choices that she likes better, replace them.

This might, I thought as I listened, be the most kink-oriented conversation happening in this bar. The music was too damn loud but the place was having a slow night, so it was pretty easy to get a sense of what other people were chatting about – most of which seemed to be their jobs. There was one conversation that seemed promising: a woman in gothy black clothes appropriate for a modest dungeon, talking with a man who looked like he just got off shift at a fire house. But they were talking about video games.

We did another round: I got a Safe Word (Elijah Craig Single Barrel, Byrrh Grand Quinquina Benedictine, Bitters), which was a significant improvement. The bartender got my drink fast, and I tried to engage her in a conversation about the place, but even with a very light crowd she wasn’t interested and seemed in a hurry to get back to … something. Or maybe she just didn’t want to talk about the bar. Vicky ordered a Highlander (Singleton Scotch, Bonal Gentiane, Bittercube Cherry Bark Vanilla Bitters, rocks), which was also quite tasty. After dipping through the menu, my advice to anyone drinking here is: Order the whiskey drinks. Those are, across the board, the best options.

“When I lived in Japan,” Vicky told me, “there was this understanding that you could devote your time to serving a larger goal, a greater good, and not make it all about yourself, and this got you a place in the community, because people saw it and respected it. And I liked that, I really did. But when I came back to the States and tried it … it hasn’t gone so well.”

She’s one of the most helpful people I know, and she’s struggling to get a sense that that’s appreciated here. She’s not the only one. I’ve known several people who were recognized as bright and helpful and self-sacrificing in other parts of the country who came to San Francisco and gradually came to feel deeply unappreciated. And at first I thought that they weren’t trying hard enough, and then I thought that they were trying too hard, and now I don’t even know what to say about it.

Except that circumstances are sometimes just stacked against us, and the most important question we have to answer is what we choose to become in our decline. From my experience, people and institutions that keep looking for the greater good are better off. But maybe there is no right answer.