Catch One, and the fifty years before it

Most people who walk into Catch One tonight have no idea they are standing in one of the most historically important nightclubs in the United States. That is not their fault. The sign outside says Catch One. It used to say Jewel's Catch One, and the difference between those two names holds about fifty years of Los Angeles.

1973, and $18,000

Jewel Thais-Williams opened the club in 1973 at 4067 West Pico Boulevard, in Arlington Heights. She bought the downstairs of the building for $18,000 and had no bartending or business experience when she did it. (Los Angeles LGBT Center; LGBTQ History Project.)

It became one of the first nightclubs in the country to serve the Black LGBTQ+ community, and it went on to be the longest running Black gay dance bar in Los Angeles. (Wikipedia; Los Angeles LGBT Center.) Thais-Williams was a Black businesswoman who had faced that discrimination directly in the early seventies, and she built the room she had been refused entry to.

The Studio 54 of the West

At its peak the club was known as the Studio 54 of the West, pulling a crowd that cut across every part of the city. Madonna, Sammy Davis Jr. and Rick James all passed through. (Los Angeles LGBT Center.)

A nightclub is a business. A sanctuary is something else, and Catch One spent decades being both at the same time.

What it did during the AIDS crisis

This is the part that separates Catch One from every other club with a long history. During the height of the AIDS crisis, Thais-Williams turned the business into a support structure for her community. In 1989 she and her partner Rue Thais-Williams opened Rue's House in the same building, providing housing and services for women and children living with HIV and AIDS. (Los Angeles LGBT Center.)

A dance floor upstairs and housing for people the city had abandoned downstairs, in one building, run by the same person.

The room today

Catch One still operates at the same address. It runs Thursday through Saturday, and the bi-level layout means two rooms can run different programming on the same night. (Venue listings, July 2026.) Booking now spans electronic, hip hop, rock and queer parties rather than any single scene.

We have run a lot of parties in this building over the years and every one of them worked. That is not true of every room in Los Angeles, and it is usually the crowd rather than the calendar that decides it.

Why we are writing about it

Inertia books rooms across Los Angeles, and the ones worth returning to tend to have been built by somebody with a reason. Catch One is the clearest example in the city. Fifty years on, it is still a room where the crowd is the point.

Sources: Los Angeles LGBT Center, Wikipedia, LGBTQ History Project oral history archive. Venue details checked against public listings in July 2026.