The Compound Basix

Open from 7 a.m. to 2 a.m. seven days a week, 365 days a year, the Compound's corner-bar (and gay-bar) legacy is just that: a twenty-plus-year run as a drinking place that barely closes. Weekday patrons start rolling in from hospital night shifts to take advantage of the early opening (and a 7 a.m. happy hour), while rowdier nighttime crowds looking to dance come later to shut the bar down. Bold purple walls and black plastic-tiled floors run throughout the front room, where a small bar services pool- and darts-playing patrons and those looking to socialize in the newly renovated tall vinyl booths. Just through a cavernous opening sits a giant wooden dance floor with a DJ booth perched high above, and Friday nights find the space wall-to-wall with sweaty bodies filing in from a line that often forms around the south Broadway building. Just outside of the dance room's glass doors is a smoking patio, heated in the fall and winter months for year-round use. The only odd accoutrement of the Compound is its wall of lockers for personal item storage.