Riviera

Riviera was a Milwaukee cocktail lounge and restaurant at 401 N. Plankinton Avenue, occupying a pre-Civil War warehouse that had earlier housed a gay-friendly tavern called the Anchor Inn. Reopened as the Riviera in 1949 and taken over by Tony Machi around 1951 as "Tony's Riviera," it became known as the city's premier gay bar of the 1950s, part of Milwaukee's first gay nightlife district along "the Strip." It was both popular and, by various accounts, entangled with police payoffs and illegal gambling.

A catastrophic five-alarm fire, reportedly set deliberately, destroyed the building in March 1964; a brief relocation to North 3rd Street followed before that site too was cleared.