Just outside of the dance room's glass doors is a smoking patio, heated in the fall and winter months for year-round use. 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.
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. happy hour), while rowdier nighttime crowds looking to dance come later to shut the bar down. Weekday patrons start rolling in from hospital night shifts to take advantage of the early opening (and a 7 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.
