Charleston gay bars

Originally at this location was Summers Market, built in the early 1940s and owned by Abraham and Takla Summers. In the 1970s Abraham Summers retired and the business passed to one of his daughters. In 1974, she decided to stop managing the store and sold it to her brother, Lee Summers. Lee Summers opened The Greek Downtown Lounge, one of the first two gay bars in Charleston. The other was the Longbranch on Morris Street, owned by Hershel Layne. Both opened around the same time.

In the late 1970s Summers built an addition on the building, added a proper stage and dancefloor, and rebranded the bar to the Grand Palace. The Grand Palace was Charleston’s biggest gay bar, on busy nights there might be 800 people there.

In 1986 Summers approached Hershel Layne about purchasing the Grand Palace since Hershel owned other gay bars in the town, and Hershel purchased the building for $200,000. Unfortunately, in the 1980s and 1990s a modern type of crowd attended the bar as the stigma of attending a gay bar lessened, and the establishment was plagued by drug raids a

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