Thirty-six twenty-four, a one bedroom apartment on the first floor, was about to be vacated, and I jumped at it. There were no vacancies along Sixth, so I took my search back to Fifth Avenue and found the boxy, stately pink stucco house next door to Celadon. (This was before Gay Mart opened on the corner of Sixth and University.) A friendly guy who gave me directions struck me a probably being gay, but nothing else tipped me off. By the time I got to University, I was enchanted by the look of the area, and when I chanced on Balboa Park, bordering Sixth Avenue, I knew where I wanted to live. After three months of living in Little Italy and bumming around downtown, I went looking for an apartment and happened to turn left off of Grape Street and onto 5th Avenue. The Brass Rail provided the occasion for my own discovery of the gay community in Hillcrest, four years ago.
