San Francisco dive bar Kilowatt operated under a 'BDSM tower'

The bar was always full of dogs, pool players and Detroit Red Wings fans. Loud punk and metal thrashed through the speakers, and if it was your birthday, you were given a very cheap bottle of champagne and a Polaroid camera to use for the night. Phones didn’t have cameras on them back then.

(Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE) (Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)

Those days are gone, but after all these years, Kilowatt is not only still here, it’s gotten a brand new shot in the arm. At the end of 2022, it was announced that Kilowatt had been sold. Normally, when a well-loved mainstay changes hands, it causes trepidation. But this time it was exciting news. After 28 years, owner Peter Athanas was retiring, and he was selling it to three folks who’d been bartenders at Bottom of the Hill and Thee Parkside for years.

“Peter wasn’t going to sell to just anybody,” Katie Rose McCarthy tells me as we sit at one of Kilowatt’s booths alongside her co-owners, Peter Nevin and Rick Eusey. “In fact, when we asked if it was for sale he said, ‘Who’s asking?’”

According to the new owners, it was their relationship with the bar’s previous proprietor that was critical to making sure the bar was passed into their stewardship. 

“He saw that we liked what he had done, what he built for the last 30 years,” McCarthy explains. “We wanted to keep the name, we wanted to keep that energy, just breathe fresh life into it.”

And they were certainly going to need his help to get through the process of buying the bar. Athanas sat down in the office with them nearly every day as they transferred everything over.

How the hell do you open a bar in San Francisco?

San Francisco is a harrowing place to open a business. Beyond the absurd cost of … well, everything, projects get held up for years by mountains of red tape, bureaucracy and prolifically greedy landlords. 

“It was nearly impossible,” Eusey answers when I ask about the difficulty of opening the place. Nevin expands on this, saying that despite working in bars for years, the process is still an administrative nightmare: “Everything is like — ‘Do you know about this permit? Do you know about that one? Do you know how to get the permit for your permit for your permit?’”

McCarthy, Nevin and Eusey might not have even gotten the bar if it weren’t for the pandemic. Seeing all the sadly shuttered businesses and learning that Athanas was on the verge of retiring created the perfect push to take late-night, post-shift “We should open a bar, man!” riffing to dive bar reality. Well, that, and a little helping of San Francisco magic.

“It was like a chain reaction,” McCarthy ruminates. “One person we’d meet would help us and then give a leg up that led to another person, and this whole thing became relationship after relationship after relationship. It feels like this was built on a mountain of good people and community.”

During the time they shut the bar down for renovations and upgrades, it seemed that nearly every day someone would randomly pop by with a pizza and a paintbrush asking what they could do to help. “This experience fundamentally changed the way I look at people,” McCarthy discloses. “It makes me think people are good. You know?”

The wildest example of this was when there was a knock at the door and Adam Pfahler, the drummer from legendary SF band Jawbreaker, was there with tacos. He said he’d been watching the Kilowatt crew’s Instagram stories and figured they needed some lunch since they didn’t seem to have time to eat or sleep. 

If that’s not a wee bit of the old San Francisco magic, I don’t know what is.

Kilowatt’s musical legacy

Beyond being an active member of the San Francisco community (Pfahler founded Lost Weekend Video), there’s probably another reason someone from Jawbreaker showered Kilowatt with extra love and attention. The bar had been a popular venue in the 1990s where the band played numerous times.

In fact, lots of ’90s bands treaded the boards of the tiny Kilowatt stage when they were up and coming, including Pavement, Murder City Devils and Neutral Milk Hotel, whom one of Nevin’s friends saw in 1996 (and booed the notoriously dissonant songwriter).

There’s also a very unsubstantiated rumor that Nirvana played at Kilowatt, with Eusey recounting a woman at the bar recently who claimed to have heard the band play “Smells Like Teen Spirit” there.

While there’s no verification of her story at the moment, the Kilowatt Three found lots of very real musical artifacts in the basement during renovation, including old concert posters and photos by SF music photographer hero Peter Ellenby. But possibly the best thing they found was a logbook of show notes from the Kilowatt’s stage manager in the ’90s with details like how the band sounded and how big the crowd was. 

And apparently, he was uh … kind of a dick. One description from 1996 of a well-known band (the Kilowatt folks wouldn’t tell me who), read, “Nobody drinks. Losers.” Another one read something like, “Norwegian rock band. Very loud. Shirtless,” and yet another one was something to the tune of, “Rude. Played a 20-minute set. Terrible.” 

(Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE) (Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)

In the logbook you can also see how much each band made and apparently, the Murder City Devils — one of McCarthy, Nevin and Eusey’s favorite bands — only got paid $100 to play.

By the time I started going to Kilowatt in the early 2000s, the only thing left of the bar’s legacy as a venue was old show posters, including the one for the final concert in 1997, headlined by The Oblivions. It’s still on the wall and says, “The Kilowatt is dead! Final f—king show!”

The musical legacy had a lot to do with the original booker, David Kaplan, who was also managing a number of bands at the time. There are conflicting accounts about whether Kaplan’s departure resulted in the end of live concerts or owner Peter Athanas pulled the plug himself, but Kaplan’s career continued without Kilowatt. Soon after his tenure at Kilowatt, Kaplan moved to New York to manage a little rock ’n’ roll duo named the White Stripes.

Crucially though, Athanas had continued to keep the live music permit up to date, which made it infinitely easier for the Kilowatt Three to get the city’s blessing for shows when they took over.

Kilowatt’s fiery past

If you’re looking at Kilowatt from across the street, and you’re familiar enough with San Francisco architecture, you’ll notice that the building was once a firehouse.

According to the history shared with me by Eusey and by this fascinating website about the history of the San Francisco Fire Department, the current building is the third firehouse built on the site. The first was built in 1854. The second one was constructed in 1868 for the newly organized Engine Company No. 7 and their horse-drawn steam engine. This one was destroyed as a result of the Great Conflagration of 1906. When it was rebuilt in 1908, it was still set up for the horsey fire brigade. It wasn’t until 1918 that this fire company got a motorized engine. The structure remained a firehouse until 1968, when Engine Company No.7 was moved to 80 Digby St. in Diamond Heights, and the family who currently owns the building bought it.

“I know for a fact that it was a bakery at one point, probably the ’60s,” Eusey tells me. “There’s an older gentleman that keeps coming in, shooting pool and taking photos and stuff. And he’s like, ‘I remember, the oven was right here …’”

One of Eusey’s friends said it was also once a restaurant owned by some family friends called Firehouse BBQ. It wasn’t until the late ’70s or early ’80s that it first became a venue called Firehouse Seven. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, it was called Paula’s Clubhouse, of which author Michelle Tea fondly remembers, “The first place I kissed a female in San Francisco is now the Kilowatt, but back then it was a queer punk dance club called Paula’s Clubhouse.”

And then in 1993, Peter Athanas bought the joint and named it Kilowatt because he was an electrician by trade.

But possibly my favorite story from the long history of the Kilowatt building is the guy who had the “BDSM tower.” Apparently, at some point in the past 30 years, a guy upstairs had wild BDSM sex orgies. This building was meant for it. Not only does the top floor have group showers left over from when the firefighters used to live there, but the tower that sits above it also has a bunch of hooks that are remnants from when it was a working firehouse.

“Anytime you go to a fire, when you come back in, the hoses are all wet, so you have to hang them up,” Eusey, who was a firefighter for Cal Fire, explained. Because of this, there’s a bunch of hooks in the tower that were used for hanging hoses (pun unintended but completely unavoidable), and the guy who lived there would use them in his kinky play.

“Wait,” Nevin cuts in during Eusey’s explanation. “Those hooks were for hanging hoses? I thought that old horny guy just hung them up there for BDSM.”

Kilowatt’s bright future

While discussing what it’s like being the next chapter in Kilowatt’s history, McCarthy told me, “It’s such an honor and privilege to be a part of keeping that going for people. I was blown away by seeing what this space means to people. I never get tired of when somebody comes in and you can just see all these memories flashing through their eyes.”

And I, too, am one of those people. Every time I walk through those doors, I can’t help but think about my wild nights running around the Mission in my 20s. And I’m so glad that Kilowatt will be around for future generations as a place to get drunk and make friends, lovers and poor decisions.