baltimore's legendary gay club owner died at 81. days later, its oldest gay bar announced a comeback. we like to think he had a word.

via The Baltimore Banner, the Gonce Funeral Service obituary and Baltimore Fishbowl.

There is a CVS at the corner of North Charles and West Eager streets in Baltimore. For 37 years before that, it was the Hippo, and the Hippo was Chuck Bowers.

Charles "Chuck" Bowers died on Sept. 22 in Baltimore, of natural causes, his niece Cathy Bowers told the Banner. He was 81. His funeral home obituary says he "peacefully passed away in his beloved hometown."

the bookkeeper who bought the club

Bowers grew up in Federal Hill, skipped college, and joined the Hippo, then still called the Hippopotamus, as its bookkeeper in 1972, the Banner reports. By 1978 he owned it. The club's motto was "Where everyone is welcome," and his friend Rik Newton-Treadway, who met him there in 1979, told the Banner, "He truly tried to make the Hippo a place for everybody," before adding, simply, "a safe space."

When AIDS arrived, Bowers made the dance floor a fundraiser. "The earliest AIDS fundraisers I can remember happened at the Hippo," Newton-Treadway said. The funeral home obituary says the very first benefit for AIDS Action Baltimore was held there, and it asks for donations to that group, or to the SPCA, in place of flowers.

Jonathan Jackson, a former barback who performs as Tatiyanna Voche', called it "my first home away from home," and remembered the night before the indoor smoking ban: "I remember everyone lighting up their cigarettes at 11:55." Bowers retired and closed the Hippo in 2015. The city named a stretch of North Charles Street Chuck Bowers Way. He never married and had no children, and his niece said all of his nieces and nephews were his own. To celebrate his retirement he took a crowd of them on two Caribbean cruises and paid for everything.

Visitation is Thursday, Oct. 1, at Gonce Funeral Service on Ritchie Highway, and the funeral Mass is Friday at Holy Cross Church in Federal Hill.

and leon's is coming back

The same week, the gayborhood Bowers helped build got one piece of it back. Leon's, the Mount Vernon bar that has been gay since 1957, per Baltimore Fishbowl, closed in July after its owner Ron Singer died. It will reopen Wednesday, the Banner reported Sunday, citing a Saturday post from the bar and its current owners. Samm Singer, who inherited it with her three siblings, is running it with her husband, longtime bartender Sam Smith.

Staff told the Banner in August that a convicted bootlegger named Leon Lampe started the place in the 1930s, and that three ghosts haunt it, including one that paces the bar before last call looking for a final hookup. If there is room for a fourth, we can think of a man who would want to see the place full.