The club began as a speakeasy called the 201 Club in 1929, located at 406 Stockton Street. When Prohibition ended in 1933, owner Joseph "Joe" Finocchio moved upstairs and began offering female impersonation acts -- inspired, according to the club's lore, by a patron who spontaneously went on stage and performed a routine the crowd enjoyed. Police raids in 1936 forced a relocation to the larger 506 Broadway location, above Enrico's Cafe. Finocchio's opened at that address on June 15, 1936, and would remain there for the rest of its life. The club's name carried a double meaning lost on most tourists: finocchio is Italian for fennel, but it is also a derogatory Italian slang term for homosexual men. Joe Finocchio, whether by calculated irony or simple use of his family name, gave his club an identity that operated on two levels from the start.

Finocchio's was never advertised as a gay club. It was marketed as entertainment -- a place for fun, open to everyone. Both gay and straight performers worked there. The acts included geisha-style performances and elaborate musical numbers that drew racially diverse crowds, which was unusual during an era of widespread segregation. This inclusive atmosphere, combined with North Beach's bohemian character, made Finocchio's enormously popular with tourists from the 1930s through the early 1990s. The performers -- among them Lenny Bruce early in his comedy career, Sir Lady Java, LaVern Cummings, Bambi Lake, and the vaudeville veteran Karyl Norman -- were artists whose craft demanded technical skill, comedic timing, and the ability to hold a room. It is widely considered that Finocchio's was a catalyst for the art of drag as it is known today.

During World War II, Finocchio's was declared "off limits" to military personnel -- not because of the entertainment, but because Joe Finocchio had been caught selling liquor to servicemembers outside authorized hours. The ban was lifted on New Year's Eve 1943 after Finocchio and other bar owners signed an agreement to limit liquor sales to military personnel between 5 p.m. and midnight. The club survived the war, survived the beat era, survived the Summer of Love, and survived the AIDS crisis that devastated the very community from which many of its performers came. Joe Finocchio died in January 1986. His widow Eve ran the club for another thirteen years before closing it on November 27, 1999, citing rising rent and declining attendance.

After Finocchio's closed, the costumes, photographs, and programs were donated to the GLBT Historical Society, preserving six decades of a performance tradition that had thrived in the gray areas of American culture. The club had published playbills, sold a fourteen-page souvenir program titled "Finocchio's: America's Most Unusual Nightclub," and built a roster of performers whose stage names -- Pussy Katt, Bobby Belle, Holly White, Freddie Renault -- reflected the camp sensibility that defined the art form. Li-Kar, who performed a "Geisha dance," also designed visuals for the playbill. Lucian Phelps wore Sophie Tucker's actual gowns on stage. The 2024 documentary about Carol Doda at the nearby Condor Club underscores how much of North Beach's twentieth-century identity was shaped by performers who pushed against what mainstream America considered acceptable entertainment. Finocchio's did it longer than any of them.