Henry Africa’s was the most famous West Coast exemplar of the 1970s “singles bar.” In contrast to the dark, clubby, male-dominated saloons that preceded the sexual revolution, singles bars were well-lit, airy, female-friendly “meet markets” that arose when second-wave feminism collided with cocktail culture. Not without irony, many singles bars were decorated like 1890s Gilded Age lounges, which had often banned unescorted women. They fancifully resurrected the era’s brass rails, Tiffany lamps, and potted plants—so many plants, in so many places, that those singles bars also came to be called fern bars. See fern bars.
When Norman Jay Hobday (1933–2011) opened Henry Africa’s in San Francisco in 1969, it wasn’t the first leafy coed hotspot in the Bay Area (three years earlier the Kingston Trio had bankrolled the Trident in Sausalito). But it was the funkiest. In addition to the usual Gay Nineties indoor garden look, Hobday decorated with electric trains, mounted taxidermy heads, and whimsical Victorian knickknacks. It somehow managed to suggest both innocent fun and a Barbary Coast bordello: the perfect combination for his newly “liberated” clientele. The drinks also played naughty and nice: the Lemon Drop, Hobday’s most enduring original cocktail, recreated the taste of the eponymous children’s candy to mask the presence of two full shots of vodka. See Lemon Drop.
Hobday loved his bar as much as his customers did, legally changing his name to Henry Africa a few years before it closed in 1986. He then opened an even more elaborate fern bar called Capt. Eddie Rickenbacker’s, but he remained Henry Africa until his dying day in 2011.
Whiting, Sam. “Henry Africa-Fern Bar Creator-Dies.” San Francisco Chronicle, March 2, 2011.
By: Jeff Berry