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)
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“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)