Harvey Meissner, standing, has announced that the Hidden Door will re-open June 16.

Hidden Door Dallas has announced via social media that the bar is set to re-open Wednesday, June 16, on the birthday of the late Tony Bobrow, who owned the club from the late 1980s until his death in February 2018.

The Hidden Door is now owned by The Anthony Bobrow Trust which is overseen by Harvey Meissner and a second trustee. Beginning in 2019, the Bobrow Trust began making regular grants to LGBTQ and HIV/AIDS organizations.

Meissner is president and general manager of the Hidden Door, and after Texas bars were shut down by order of the governor and, in Dallas County, County Judge Clay Jenkins, Meissner has chosen to keep the bar closed until Jenkins and county health department officials said it was really safe to re-open (despite Gov. Greg Abbott’s decision to allow bars and restaurants to re-open earlier this year at full capacity).

Meissner and the bar’s management have taken advantage of the down time over the last 12-plus months to remodel the bar’s interior and patio,

According to what Meissner told Dallas Voice in a December 2019 interview, when the Hidden Door was celebrating its 40th anniversary, prior to the 2020 shutdown forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, in its entire 40-year history, the bar had only ever been closed for a day and a half. The half day, Meissner said, was in 1988 for founder Jim Roberts’ funeral. The full day closure happened, he added, when someone filled out the bar’s TABC liquor license renewal form but then went on vacation without mailing it in. Bobrow refused to open without his liquor license and closed the bar for a day until the renewal was in place.

In other, unrelated Dallas bar news, the building on Fitzhugh Avenue which for many years had housed Pub Pegasus has been demolished. The site — at the corner of Fitzhugh and Buena Vista Street, is likely to be incorporated into a new development project going up near by.

— Tammye Nash