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It was just a crowd that I could feel comfortable with.” “It didn’t matter if it was five o’clock in the afternoon or if it was eight o’clock at night. “I started going there all the time,” Robinson told them. As a “much larger guy” at the age of 22, Robinson said that he “didn’t fit the mold” expected at many other gay spaces, but what he liked about Bike Stop is that it welcomed the “freaks and the geeks.” He and his friend went back every night that week, and he eventually started bartending there. Closing up after a late shift, as the lore goes, may be peppered with the sound unexplained footsteps from the floors above.īut Robinson said that despite his initial trepidation, the bar almost instantly felt like home. Staffers say the space, which was a lesbian bar and a drag club before it became a leather bar in 1982, carries with it the spirits of its storied history but also actual ghosts. A four-story building located in Philadelphia’s bustling gayborhood, visitors enter through an alleyway with a dumpster on one side and a sparsely attended massage parlor on the other. The first time John Robinson visited the Bike Stop, he was so intimidated that he held his friend’s hand for comfort. Read more from the Queer Spaces Project here. memorializing LGBTQ+ spaces that have shut down amid the COVID-19 pandemic, while also highlighting other businesses that are struggling to survive.