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The Club 5 Complex was opened by Ed Grunewald as a replacement for his 'Manoeuvres' bar, which needed more room for expansion. He created a large complex of several separate serving bars, a restaurant, and outside space for volleyball etc. From the beginning, the business had three separate identities within the building, specifically: Club 5 restaurant and Bar: The major portion of the space was a DJ area and large dance floor area with a couple of bars. The "full service restaurant... serves lunch, dinner and Fri./Sat. after hours". Barracks: Men's bar, rustic setting. A place for the Levi/Leather community, Unicorns of Madison meetings and club nights, special events, etc. Always had many guys in jeans and t-shirts, or often shirtless. At times showed X-rated/ 'Adult' movies. Planet Q Video Dance Bar: with pool tables, dart boards, etc. Early ads also mentioned a "Q Gift Shop". And in April 1999, Ed added The Fox Hole womyn's bar to the building. Club 5 came about largely to fulfill a desperate need. During the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s, the main LGBTQ bars in the Madison area were Rod's (levi/ leather bar), the New Bar (dance bar), and the Cafe Palms restaurant-- all located in the Hotel Washington building. But early in 1996, a fire destroyed that entire building, and Madison's LGBTQ community needed gathering places to replace those facilities. The next largest bar to the 'New Bar' was Manoeuvres bar-- but even it wasn't large enough for all the new customers looking for a replacement to New Bar, Rod's, and Cafe Palms. Thus the Manoeuvres owner looked to expand his business space to meet that need. For its first ten years, business was great. 'Club 5' was Madison's primary dance venue and the complex was Madison LGBTQ community's 'place to be', with its restaurant, drag shows and contests, a separate bar (Barracks) for levi/ leather men, and an outside patio for drinks, dining, and a sand volleyball court. In 2007, bartender Dave Eick, a Hartford native now living in Madison and working in the restaurant industry, was promoted to general manager of Club 5. Shortly after, owner Ed Grunewald was diagnosed with a swiftly moving form of pancreatic cancer- and he offered Eick sole ownership of the business. Grunewald died April 21, 2008. While Grunewald's heirs did not originally recognize the legality of the gift, Eick eventually settled and had sole ownership of the business. But it was soon to be the beginning of some difficult times. First, the recession of 2008 took its toll, when staff and expenses had to be cut back. Eick added some events and made some changes to the bar's image. For example, in August 2011, a Facebook post stated: "Brand new Absolut Lounge/dance floor put in, one of many renovations the owner has done. If you haven't been here in a while it's worth checking out again! Madison's true LGBT hot spot!" In May 2012, Eick and his life partner Matt Couper tweaked the name to simply "FIVE Nightclub", although many LGBT periodicals continued to list the bar as "Club 5" in their bar directories. According to an article in Isthmus.com: "The south-side venue rechristened last week as Five Nightclub & Showbar, formerly Club 5, has a new dance floor, stage and sound system. That's not all: Totally dismantled is the Barracks, a backroom leather bar that for years played porn on six screens and served as a refuge for gay men behind boarded-up windows." "These changes are not merely cosmetic. Promos advertising the May 16 grand opening made a point of calling Five an "environment where everyone is welcome." The club's new tagline is "step up, and step out, Madison!" "The Barracks was a tough one to let go, (Eick) says, but necessary. On a practical level, it was a relic of a time when men needed bars to hook up... the Barracks (had) provided the sense of privacy now readily available online." Then in 2013, the city of Madison began rebuilding Fish Hatchery Road and its bridge across the Beltline, just adjacent to the club. The lengthy construction project took traffic on the road-- and to FIVE-- down to a crawl. Still struggling to recover from the 2008 recession and the costs incurred in the 2012 remodeling, expenses continued to pile up and the bar fell behind in taxes and rent. In 2014 a rent increase loomed, and the bar was on the verge of closing: on April 14, 2014, Eick announced the bar would soon be closing permanently. Madison's LGBTQ community wasn't ready to lose its largest gathering place, and a fan of the bar started a crowdsource fundraising campaign. By April 25, 2014 Eick was able to announce that FIVE Nightclub had been saved, by a combination of funds raised from the community, as well as temporary rent relief from the building owner. It looked like FIVE was destined to live on, and five busy and relatively successful years saw its business gradually rebuilding. But the difficult times weren't over yet. In February-March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and the bar (along with millions of other bars, restaurants and other businesses around the world) was temporarily forced to close in March 2020 to reduce the spread of the disease. When it reopened around July 2020, legal capacity was temporarily greatly reduced and customers had to remain seated with social distancing and face mask use by staff and customers enforced. Through the Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Years holidays, crowds were essentially banned and (like all bars) the ambiance was subdued. COVID restrictions were gradually reduced, and around June 1, 2021, mask use by those vaccinated was often lifted (at the discretion of management) and capacity limits raised back to pre-pandemic levels. FIVE had survived the pandemic-- but many bars and restaurants across the country had been forced to close permanently, having been unable to sustain a year or more of no or greatly reduced business. Even such national gay bar landmarks as The Stonewall and Julius' in New York City had nearly gone under. The bar landscape was drastically changed. In 2023, the bar quietly observed its 25th anniversary. FIVE continues to be a pillar of Madison's LGBTQ community, being the area's primary LGBTQ dance venue, and hosting frequent drag shows as well as such notable drag contests as Miss Club Wisconsin. (Images from the Club 5 Complex's founding and first year in business follow:)
(The Project is collecting additional Advertising Images, Photos and Articles from subsequent years, and will post them shortly.) |
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Last updated: August-2024.
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