History
Charlie Low opened the Forbidden City in 1938, naming it after the Forbidden City in Beijing. It was the first, and most famous, among approximately 12 Asian-themed cabaret clubs in Chinatown. It thrived during World War II, and throughout the 1940s and 1950s.
In 1957 author C. Y. Yee wrote a best-selling novel, Flower Drum Song, set at the Forbidden City. Rodgers and Hammerstein created a popular musical from the book in 1958, which has had several revivals, the most recent by David Henry Hwang in 2001-2002. In 1961 a Hollywood film was made from the musical. These portrayals did little to help the club, however. By the late 1950s it was facing increasing competition from more explicit shows, such as the Condor Club in North Beach. The club converted briefly to a strip club before closing in 1962. The space was destroyed by a fire in the 1980s, but the building survived and was used as a computer instruction center as of 2000.
An hour-long documentary, Forbidden City, U.S.A, was filmed in the mid-1980s and released in 1989, featuring most of the original cast. The documentary led indirectly to a second singing career for Larry Ching, the club's "Chinese Frank Sinatra."
Read more about this topic: Forbidden City (nightclub)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In front of these sinister facts, the first lesson of history is the good of evil. Good is a good doctor, but Bad is sometimes a better.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“English history is all about men liking their fathers, and American history is all about men hating their fathers and trying to burn down everything they ever did.”
—Malcolm Bradbury (b. 1932)