Word of the week: Condor

It's a bird! It's a famous San Francisco nightclub! It's an excuse to talk about the Incas!

Last weekend I saw the new documentary Carol Doda Topless at the Condor, which tells the story of the first “topless” dancer in the United States and the San Francisco nightclub that became wildly popular thanks to her sensational act: dancing bare-breasted on a white piano that slowly descended from the club’s ceiling. Along the way, the film explores the rise and fall of San Francisco’s bawdy Broadway, where the Condor Club is still located; the influence of fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, inventor of the monokini (a demi-garment Doda wore while performing in early 1964); the role of feminism in the topless craze, which eventually swept the whole country; the legal tussles over public nudity¹; the era’s political landscape (Doda began her topless act while, on the other side of town, Republican delegates were nominating the hyper-conservative U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater² for president); and the effects of injectable industrial silicone, which transformed Carol Doda’s poitrine from “fried eggs” into “two of the City’s most famous landmarks,” as the publicists liked to say, and which may have contributed to the kidney failure that caused her death at 78, in 2015.

Poster for “Carol Doda Topless at the Condor”

It is by turns a funny, revealing (in every sense), alarming, and tragic story. (In 1983, that white piano became a crime scene when bouncer Jimmy Ferrozzo was found dead on the instrument atop his live, immobilized girlfriend — “his face was in her bush, with blow [cocaine] all around,” as one of the documentary’s interview subjects gleefully puts it. The piano had somehow wedged up against the ceiling.³ The Condor Club created a cocktail called Sex on the Piano to commemorate the incident.) And it leaves plenty of questions about Doda’s life, which may have involved a couple of children whom she gave up when a youthful marriage dissolved.

You know me, though. The unanswered question that’s plaguing me is the name of that club. The Condor: Why?

Condor is the common name of two species of New World vultures, one native to the Andes and the other to California. (The California condor⁴ is not the state bird; that honor belongs to the California quail with its adorable topknot.) The word comes to us from Spanish via Quechua, the language spoken by Andean peoples at least since the time of the Inca empire.

A California condor, Gymnogyps californianus, “the Elvis Presley of endangered species.” (KALW)

Quechua, which is still spoken by 8 million to 13 million people, has provided Spanish and English with a useful group of loanwords. The Spanish word for potato, papa, is Quechua. So are a bunch of words known to speakers of English: poncho, llama, vicuña, guano, pampa, and (possibly) gaucho. And here’s a wonderful word that’s Quechua in disguise: lagniappe (a little something extra; a gratuity), which migrated into Louisiana French from Spanish la ñapa, which the Spaniards had borrowed from Quechua yapa (“something added”).

An 18th-century painting depicting Manco Cápac, the 13th-century C.E. founder of the Inca empire. Via Wikipedia.

Back to Carol Doda and that club: Why name a San Francisco bar after a big, ugly raptor?

Short answer: I still haven’t figured it out.

Here’s what I do know:

The Condor Club opened in 1958 as a music venue; in the pre-topless era, Bobby Freeman, the Righteous Brothers, and a very young Sly Stone performed there. The club took over a space that had been called the Pisco Bar and then Pucci’s House of Pisco (an homage not to the fashion designer Emilio Pucci but to owner Mario Puccinelli), which may be a tiny clue to the origin of the “Condor” name.

Pisco brandy, a Peruvian specialty named for the port city of Pisco, Peru, had been brought to California by Peruvian immigrants during the mid-19th-century Gold Rush. (There were a lot of argonauts from Peru and other South American countries, and there’s still enough of a Peruvian presence in San Francisco to warrant several “10 Best Peruvian restaurants” lists. There’s even a newish Japanese-Peruvian⁵ restaurant in Union Square called Chotto Matta, the name is not Quechua but Japanese for “Wait a minute.”) San Francisco bartenders turned Pisco brandy into the potent “Pisco punch,” which was likely made with cocaine-laden Vin Mariani. (Yes, this is the second time cocaine has appeared in this story.)

Inca Kola, bottled in Peru. Contains neither Pisco brandy nor Vin Mariani..

So when Gino Del Prete bought the Pisco in 1958. he and partner Pete Mattioli may have been thinking Peruvian thoughts and landed on “Condor” as a nod to the joint’s history. This is, however, just speculation on my part.

I’ll say this: “Condor” was and is the most distinctive name on the block.

Consider the competition in the 1960s:

There was Big Al’s (also an early adopter of topless and bottomless dancing, now a cigar shop). The name and the marquee, which depicts a Tommy-gun-toting, cigar-chomping gangster, appear to be a reference the notorious Al Capone, who for a time was a resident of nearby Alcatraz Island⁶. In fact, though, the club was named after one of the club’s three partners. But the nickname and the imagery gave the impression of vice and danger, which was of course the point.

Other Broadway neighbors included The Roaring 20s (again: lawlessness, speakeasies), The Lusty Lady (lust! ladies!), and Finocchio’s, which was named after owner Joe Finocchio but had a lucky extra meaning: finocchio (“fennel”) is Italian slang for “homosexual,” and Joe Finocchio, who was not gay, turned his club into a showcase for what were then called female impersonators.

“Condor” had none of those connotations. It could have been the name of a restaurant, a legitimate theater, or an paper mill. The name was so detached from the goings-on within the club that it functioned as an empty vessel, allowing you to fill it with your own associations. Exotic pet? Scary raptor? Beyond the Condor’s doors anything could take place, and just about anything did.

The topless fad soon seemed pedestrian — there were topless shoeshine stands, topless pool halls, topless bands, and, in 1983, a famous New York Post crime-story headline, “Headless Body in Topless Bar,” The clubs had to up the ante, and soon there were live sex acts, or something resembling them, on Broadway nightclub stages. A punk club, Mabuhay Gardens, opened down the street from the Condor; I once saw the Nuns and the Cramps perform there. The scene got grimmer. Clubs closed. And then the internet happened, and porn went online, and no one needed to leave home to get the thrills once provided by live, bare-breasted dancers.

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Carol Doda Topless at the Condor is now playing in Oakland, Berkeley, and San Rafael; it opens tomorrow at San Francisco’s Roxie Theater. It may be playing somewhere near you, too. Meanwhile, here’s the red-band trailer (“approved for appropriate audiences”):

1. Fun fact: “Bottomless” dancing was OK in San Francisco as long as the dancers wore merkins: pubic wigs. I know a thing or two about merkins, having written about them for the Strong Language blog in 2022.

2. “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” - Barry Goldwater, in the words of his speechwriter, Karl Hess.

3. Accident? Foul play? Still unclear.

4. My former colleague David Darlington wrote a fine book, In Condor Country, about the near-extinction of the California condor.

5. You may recall that one of Peru’s recent presidents, the disgraced Alberto Fujimori, was the son of Japanese immigrants.

6. Here is a gift link to a thoroughly depressing New York Times op-ed about scofflaw Donald J. Trump’s increasingly admiring references to Al Capone. “He was seriously tough, right?” Trump told an Iowa crowd last October.