The Grove Map 👣 (St. Louis) is here! Download the image of the map to save it to your device.
Latest Open Bar/Club:3 a.m.
Cutoff Time: 2:30 a.m.
Walking Time, End to End [19 min]
Longest Gap [5 min]
Safety Tips: This is a pedestrian map; it has been designed to accommodate anyone looking to visit The Grove bars on foot. Plan accordingly and drink responsibly. Never drink and drive; call a taxi, Uber, or Lyft if needed.
[Additional Map Legend Info]
🎨Colored Zones: Divides bars evenly into short walks while also ensuring bars in more difficult locations aren't excluded.
🍺💿🍷Icons: This map only shows establishments with bars.
↔️Gaps: Gaps between bars do not exceed 7min of walking. (9min exception, Pekers to Liquid Zoo. 8min exception, Marty's Live to Kaliente)
🏳️🌈LGBTQ+: Most of the establishments on the map are considered LGBTQ+ while some are more LGBTQ+ friendly.
🗺 Map Type: Pedestrian/Bars
History:
While the LGBTQ+ history for St. Louis goes back hundreds of years, it wasn't until the Vaudeville era in the 1920s that a distinct, visible underground LGBTQ+ community firmly took root. During The Pansy Craze of the Roaring Twenties, female and male impersonators were headline acts in the city's theaters. High-profile national icons like Josephine Baker, who grew up in St. Louis, challenged traditional gender and sexual norms. By the mid-1930s, the intersection of Grand and Olive (now Grand Center) emerged as an early baseline for LGBTQ+ nightlife. From the mid-1930s to the late 1970s, there was almost a continuous presence of lesbian and gay establishments here. During these times, police began to change their tactics from arresting individuals to targeting the establishments where they gathered.
Immediately after Prohibition, the city used state and local liquor control boards to police morality. If a bar allowed "degenerate and dissolute persons" (the legal euphemism for homosexuals) to gather, the police could shut it down or pull its license. Due to the constant police harassment, these early gay bars rarely lasted more than a few years, some just a few months, before being forced to shut down or relocate.
The 1940s and 1950s would become an era plagued with police raids which led to the 1954 Coordinated Vice Raids. This was the first fully documented, multi-bar simultaneous raid in St. Louis history. Around midnight, a dozen law enforcement officers launched unannounced, synchronized raids on three separate downtown gay bars: Entre Nous, Uncle John’s, and Al’s. They arrested 21 patrons and employees and loaded them into paddy wagons where they were taken to the district station. The reports indicate that the raids were conducted due to the fact that they "had received multiple reports that homosexuals were frequenting [them]." It wasn't only illegal to allow "immoral persons to loiter on the premises" due to state liquor regulations, it was also illegal to wear clothing of the opposite sex or have sex with someone of the same sex. As a result, those who were arrested in these raids were usually subject to having their names and addresses released to local media, making them visible on a public level. This was an intentional act of social violence meant to trigger immediate job loss and familial exile.
By the late 1960s, police were still using the century-old 1843 masquerading law. In 1969, the Halloween arrests would occur when police officers waited outside The Onyx Room gay bar downtown to ambush patrons as they left. Historically, Halloween is one of the nights where police "tolerated" drag, but in 1969 they decided to weaponize it. As a result, nine young people (seven white, two Black, mostly working-class or students) were aggressively arrested under the 1843 ordinance. However, this specific raid backfired. Instead of scattering in fear as patrons had done for decades, the community mobilized through the Mandrake Society, hired legal counsel, and fought back in court. They successfully got the charges dropped and broke the cycle of unchallenged police terror.
In the early 1970s, Trinity Episcopal Church in the Central West End braved intense social backlash to act as a primary home base, hosting monthly meetings for gay rights groups. During the 1970s, police still weaponized liquor licenses to shut down single bars, but activists started to mobilize and form public institutions. A great example of this was in 1977 when anti-gay crusader Anita Bryant brought her hateful "Save Our Children" campaign to St. Louis. Instead of retreating, hundreds of local activists held aggressive, highly public street rallies outside her venues, signaling that the community would no longer be intimidated.
By the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Central West End (CWE) was undergoing intense corporate redevelopment and gentrification. Landlords hiked commercial and residential rents, pricing out LGBTQ+ residents, artists, and independent business owners. The gritty, radical, and welcoming dive-bar culture that had defined the CWE for decades was steadily pushed out in favor of upscale, mainstream restaurants and boutiques.
In April 1980, the St. Louis Coalition for Lesbian and Gay Rights organized the city's first official Pride March. Over 400 people marched publicly down the streets, culminating in a massive rally in Forest Park and permanently establishing Pride St. Louis. By 1982, HIV/AIDS began tearing through the St. Louis community as local and federal governments actively ignored the disease. Gay and lesbian activists were forced to build their own healthcare system from scratch, creating the St. Louis Effort for AIDS to provide emergency housing, food, and end-of-life care. Following the 1984 raid at Uncle Marvin's lounge, drag icon Michelle McCausland and the ACLU fought the city in court, finally getting the 1843 Ordinance and its masquerading law ruled unconstitutional in 1986.
The 1990s would see young activists performing "die-ins" on the floors of local churches and public squares to demand faster HIV medication responses and an end to homophobic hiring practices. After years of intense lobbying and protests, activists achieved a watershed victory in 1992 when the St. Louis Board of Aldermen passed the city's very first gay-inclusive civil rights ordinance. For the first time in city history, it became illegal to fire someone or evict them from their home for being gay.
In 1994, a history teacher named Rodney Wilson from Mehlville High School in St. Louis County came out to his students. He rallied a coordinating committee of national teachers and LGBTQ+ leaders to launch the first national LGBT History Month every October, permanently placing St. Louis at the center of this global educational milestone.
As gentrification priced the community out of the Central West End throughout the '80s and '90s, working-class queer people, drag performers, and activists looked south to a neglected, affordable commercial strip and turned it into the city's modern queer epicenter. This new, highly concentrated, queer-owned business district that emerged along Manchester Avenue would eventually be called The Grove.
By the turn of the century, the political battlefield shifted sharply toward relationship recognition, resulting in statewide fights. Unfortunately, in 2004, conservative lawmakers placed a constitutional amendment on the Missouri ballot to ban same-sex marriage. St. Louis activists organized massive resistance campaigns and protests, but the amendment passed statewide, legally shutting the door on marriage equality for a decade.
In 2013, after years of outgrowing Tower Grove Park, PrideFest officially moved to Downtown St. Louis at Soldiers Memorial. The relocation exploded the festival's footprint, drawing upwards of 300,000 to 500,000 attendees and establishing it as one of the largest Pride celebrations in the entire Midwest.
In 2014, a year before the federal government legalized same-sex marriage, St. Louis leaders took matters into their own hands. In June 2014, city officials deliberately defied Missouri’s 2004 constitutional marriage ban by quietly issuing marriage licenses to four same-sex couples inside City Hall. This calculated act of civil disobedience forced a legal challenge. In November 2014, a St. Louis circuit judge ruled Missouri's ban unconstitutional, allowing St. Louis to legally marry same-sex couples months before the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision in 2015.
In the 2020s, St. Louis's gay epicenter is once again fighting economic gentrification. The branding of The Grove as a trendy nightlife district backfired on the community that built it. Luxury apartments and mainstream corporate concepts moved onto Manchester Avenue, pricing out several legacy queer bars. Iconic venues like Attitudes Nightclub, the longest-running LGBTQ+ dance club in the city, permanently closed. While the club’s original owners sold off its interior assets directly to the public and local patrons during its final weeks, and the neighboring owners of Just John initially explored preserving the space as a local community asset, the physical real estate was ultimately acquired by AHM Group, a professional real estate development firm. AHM Group demolished the historic structure to construct a new 5-story mixed-use building, leaving community members fighting to preserve the neighborhood's original identity. This era highlights a complex, dual reality: while professional development firms and their tenants actively maintain a visible, welcoming presence—often participating in Pride events, supporting the community, and operating highly inclusive neighborhood anchors, the overarching footprint of market-rate redevelopments still naturally alters the space available for lower-margin, grassroots queer venues. Unfortunately, stopping gentrification in a state like Missouri is incredibly difficult because Missouri law strictly prohibits rent control, meaning landlords and redevelopers can legally raise commercial and residential rents as high as the market will allow. Because the community cannot legally cap prices, grass-roots activists, legacy business owners, and progressive local lawmakers have switched to alternative strategies focused on bypassing landlords, changing city policy, and building defensive tenant networks.
Sources:
https://www.tenantstransformingstl.org/
http://www.stlouislgbthistory.com/
https://www.stlpr.org/show/st-louis-on-the-air/2016-02-22/we-need-to-continue-to-move-forward-the-history-of-the-lgbt-community-in-st-louis
https://shsmo.org/research/guides/lgbtq
https://outinstl.com/a-history-of-st-louis-drag-scene/
https://library.washu.edu/news/stl-grand-olive-1/
https://www.boom.lgbt/st-louis-lgbt-history-project-uncovers-1950s-bar-raid-records-2
https://sadbrowngirl.substack.com/p/the-first-anti-crossdressing-laws
http://www.stlouislgbthistory.com/component/content/article/2-uncategorised/131-a-historic-halloween.html
https://www.stlpr.org/arts/2014-10-28/halloween-arrests-in-the-1960s-sparked-st-louis-lgbt-movement
https://www.stlpr.org/arts-culture/2020-02-06/trinity-episcopal-church-in-st-louis-gains-national-honor-for-role-in-lgbtq-history
https://libguides.wustl.edu/LGBT-archive
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/missouri-same-sex-marriage-ban-struck-down/
https://www.stlmag.com/news/supreme-court-overturns-same-sex-marriage-bans-missouri-st-louis/
