The Condor Club: World's First Topless Bar

It's Friday. Time for a history lesson.

It's not everyday you get to write about the place where topless dancing was born. That's right. Now, you might have thought that women dancing in public with their breasts exposed is as old as, well, at least as old as pasties, but the fact is that one little bar in San Francisco (of course it HAD to be San Francisco) is the reputed spot on which a woman dancer first removed her top and bared her glowing white mammaries to an admiring throng of drunken males.

The place is the Condor Club, located in North Beach. It was here that a Condor waitress named Carol Doda leapt atop a white baby grand piano and wagged her pendulous, um, gazongas, for all to admire. There was music of course, followed immediately by the sound of dozens of male tongues hitting the floor. And it gets better.

Doda, apparently unsatisfied with the gravitational properties of her breasts (which were carefully studied by various scientists from nearby Berkeley laboratories who came to the Condor strictly for professional reasons), subsequently underwent breast enlargement surgery to increase her bust size from 34 to 44 inches, an impressive achievement to say the least.

Wait, there's even more titillating stories to tell about the Condor. In 1983, one night after closing, one of the dancers and one of the bouncers at the club did the horizontal mambo on top of the piano, which apparently had some kind of hydraulic system beneath it allowing it to be raised or lowered. The piano was "accidentally" raised to the ceiling, crushing the bouncer to death and leaving Hill pinned there beneath him until a janitor found them the next morning. Now if that isn't a story to tell the grandkids, I don't know what is.

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