San Francisco is a collection of small villages nestled among each other, under the cool damp fog. Despite the many shifts over the past few decades, most of these little villages maintain their unique vibes and local cultures. Because of that, it’s easy to get stuck in your own neighborhood, which makes exploring other (relatively) far-flung regions of the city feel like a vacation in your own town.
If you’re like me, it means you’ve got favorite bars you rarely visit scattered around San Francisco. I’ve lived on the Mission/SoMa border for 11 years, so there are places I love around town that I don’t get to pop into enough. And in the Inner Richmond, that bar is 540 Rogues. Whenever I’m in the area, whether it’s grubbing on dim sum, book-shopping at Green Apple or ogling the tropical fish at 6th Avenue Aquarium, I always stop in for a tipple or triple.
“This is the original craft dive bar,” Clarke Dorsey tells me from behind the stick. It’s midafternoon on a Thursday, so he’s balancing serving the happy hour clientele and answering my questions about the history of the bar. Kevin Hansen, one of his business partners, is seated next to me, tag-teaming the answers. Both of them were born and raised in SF and were employees of the bar before the pandemic.
The spacious bar at 540 Rogues draws a devout crowd of regulars from the Richmond District and all over San Francisco.
Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE
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“Ben Mansell, the old GM coined the term [craft dive bar],” Dorsey continues. “Before we closed down, I think we had two cocktail glasses, but we always made a really good cocktail. And now, we’ll make you one of the best versions of a classic cocktail but also give you a dive bar, shot-and-a-beer vibe.”
“Just don’t let it become a mixology bar!” one of the regulars hollers playfully from across the room.
“I will never allow that to happen,” Hansen earnestly replies.
The boozy history of 540 Clement St.
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540 Rogues is a brand-new bar … kinda.
The space at 540 Clement St. has had a lot of lives, almost all of them boozy. It was constructed in the early 1900s as the Bank of Italy and later listed as the Park-Presidio Office of the Pacific States Savings and Loan Company in November 1929.
As documented by some longtime 540 Club regulars who contribute to the Western Neighborhoods Project — a nonprofit that “preserves and shares the history and culture of the neighborhoods in western San Francisco” — someone has been dispensing alcohol at 540 Clement St. since at least 1936, when William and Ella Greely were listed in the Polk’s Crocker-Langley San Francisco City Directory as serving beer there. While it’s a little hazy on whether it was a bar or a liquor store, we know for sure that it has been distributing good times for 87 years, assuming many different identities: Five-Forty Club (1942), Touchables 540 Club (1963), Touchables (1969), Hak’s Cocktail Lounge (1972) and Hak’s (1975). It became Max’s in 1980, but was also referred to as Max’s 540 in a 1989 Examiner profile that quoted bartender Karen Ziesmer as saying, “This is the only bar in town where the customer’s never right.” In the 1990s, it was called O’Rourke’s, and then in 2003, it became the 540 Club under the ownership of Jamie Brown.
From what was originally built as a bank, 540 Clement Street still retains many original historic details, upper right and lower left, as well as the signage for Max’s 540 Club, upper left. (Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)(Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)From what was originally built as a bank, 540 Clement Street still retains many original historic details, upper right and lower left, as well as the signage for Max’s 540 Club, upper left. (Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)(Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)
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From 2003 to 2020, it was a perfectly dingy, smelly dive bar with cracked floor tiles, local art, pool, cheap drinks, and what was rumored to be one of the city’s first internet jukeboxes. Then the world shut down, and so did the 540 Club. We all feared that it was the end of the Inner Richmond’s best dive bar. Then the now-owners of 540 Rogues stepped in.
“I was doing work from home, and I was miserable,” Dorsey explains. Before the pandemic, he was managing the bar while also working in tech. “The one thing that was missing was hospitality.”
One day, the landlord called Dorsey and asked if he was interested in opening the business, so he and Hansen went on a bike ride through the city to talk about it. “And then that became something a lot bigger than we ever expected,” he says.
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Two of 540 Rogues’ co-owners, Leejay Victor and Clarke Dorsey, hang with the crowd at their historic bar on Clement Street in San Francisco’s Richmond District on Saturday night, May 27, 2023.
Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE
Teaming up with Leejay Victor, who had also worked at the 540 Club, and Chris Squire, who had worked down the street, they bought a new liquor license, since the previous one had too many dings on it. And then in October 2021, they went to work opening 540 Rogues.
What makes 540 great
My love affair with the bar started probably 15 years ago when it was the 540 Club. To put it succinctly, it was a great bar in which to get tore up. What it lacked in frills, it made up for in drunkenness. There were weekly specials like $1 well drinks on Mondays and $2 cocktails on Tuesdays. The mascot was a pink elephant, which was a nod to delirium tremens, the condition, not the beer. But most importantly, it was always filled with cool people. Most of them lived in the neighborhood, worked in the service industry or both. I felt at home the first time I walked in the door. According to Hansen, the demographics have shifted just slightly since the name change.
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“Reopening after the whole COVID thing, we thought we’d see a lot of the same faces,” Hansen tells me. “A lot of people have moved away. A lot has changed. But new people have moved in, and maybe others have aged into our group, and they want to find a chill bar and not go clubbing. So, we picked up a lot of really cool neighborhood people that call this their local now.”
Inside 540 Rogues: Local “Chef” Pierre Benitomako, upper right, shows off his custom 540 Club tattoo (by Jason Story of Picture Machine), lower left, amid other bar regulars … canine and otherwise. (Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATEInside 540 Rogues: Local “Chef” Pierre Benitomako, upper right, shows off his custom 540 Club tattoo (by Jason Story of Picture Machine), lower left, amid other bar regulars … canine and otherwise. (Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE
What makes the 540 a truly great bar, though, is that everyone is welcome and feels comfortable. It wouldn’t be strange to see someone tattooed knuckles to neck, who works as a door guy somewhere, sitting next to a tech millionaire while they chop it up and watch the Warriors game.
That said, opening a bar in 2021 wasn’t easy. The post-pandemic recovery has been extremely tough on nightlife. People just don’t seem to go out as much as they used to. But unlike downtown businesses that largely catered to commuters and tech companies, neighborhoods like the Inner Richmond are having a bit of a renaissance. The past few years have seen a boon of cool, creative, locally owned new shops open within just a handful of blocks on Clement. The Golden Hour is a vintage shop, Fleetwood acts as a gallery, boutique and screen-printing place, and The Drawing Room is an art gallery. Collectively they team up with other local spots that have been around for years, like Park Life, and do events like the Clement Street Holiday Stroll or the First Thursday Art Walk. Of course, 540 Rogues takes part in this too, hosting a “Drink and Draw” night where people can chase their old fashioneds with a wee bit of arts and crafts.
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Don’t mess with a good dive
What struck me most the first time I walked into 540 Rogues was that they’d managed to keep what made the 540 Club special while getting rid of what sucked. And by that, I mean the smell. Yes, I know a dive is a dive, and often old, terrible plumbing comes with the territory. But it certainly is glorious when it doesn’t.
“We didn’t want to ruin the vibe and the culture,” Dorsey explained. “But there were holes in the floor. And there were places where you walked and it would drop you down a couple of inches. And the plumbing was a disaster.”
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Bartender Jack Murphy pours his signature Manhattan at 540 Rogues in San Francisco’s Richmond District on May 29, 2023.
Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE
Since they got the keys during the pandemic, it allowed them to take the time to do things right. Instead of turning it into some fancy new place, they renovated the space and brought it back to its former glory, highlighting some of the original features, like the high ceiling, heavy bank doors and Aztec-themed floor tiles. But there was still some necessary gutting involved.
“At one point, we had demoed about a foot and a half down,” Dorsey details, “and the only thing left was the bar top, which was suspended by an engine hoist so we could pour concrete around it.”
They also incorporated various things from the bar’s previous lives and gave them a new purpose, like hanging an old Max’s sign inside or converting a church pew from the 540 Club into the wheelchair-accessible bar. And while they had to get rid of the pool table to make enough space to get to the bathroom, to comply with the Americans with Disabilities Act, they brought in lots of cool old-school arcade games instead.
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(Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)(Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)(Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)(Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE)
As happens with so many old buildings, the renovation led to some unique and bizarre surprises. Under a layer of carpet, then wood, then tile, then more wood, they found the 6-square-foot cement footing for where the bank vault had been. Then there was a humongous (“like 100-inch, 600-pound”) rear-projection TV embedded into the mezzanine wall that was hidden by a projector screen. Also hidden was the giant shadow box-esque space you now see above the front wall adorned with the Golden Gate Bridge. While sanding and painting, the 540 Rogues team came across glass that had been painted over. Behind it, the space was completely intact and ready to use again. All they had to do was put in new lightbulbs.
The rogues’ gallery
As I was finishing my conversation with the guys, I finally asked, “So, what’s behind the name 540 Rogues, and hey, is that Carmen Sandiego on your logo?”
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“That’s Carla San Leandro, sir! And she has no affiliation with Carmen Sandiego,” Dorsey responded with a mischievous smirk.
But the name of the bar came about because of the owners’ self-proclaimed nerdiness. It was partially inspired by the fact that Dorsey, Victor and Squire all play Dungeons & Dragons (there’s a class of characters called rogues). They also noted that “Rogue One” is the best “Star Wars” film, but the history of San Francisco played just as much of a role.
540 Rogues is at 540 Clement St. in San Francisco’s Richmond District and is open from 2 p.m. to 2 a.m. on weekdays and from noon to midnight on weekends.
Kevin Kelleher & Emily Trinh/Special to SFGATE
“There’s a book called ‘The Magnificent Rogues of San Francisco,’” Dorsey explained, “that’s like short vignettes on the Barbary Coast era and the scoundrels, crooks and miscreants, the historical people like the Emperor Nortons of the city. So, it was kind of an homage to that.”
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Most importantly, though, the name came about because this band of misfits went rogue and bought themselves a bar. And the Inner Richmond and San Francisco are better because of it.
