The space reopened as a multi-level leather bar over Memorial Day weekend 2026, with upstairs, downstairs, and patio areas — but it's also now the home of the Baton Showroom, which keeps alive the legacy of the Baton Show Lounge, a drag institution founded in 1969 by Jim Flint that ran for nearly 50 years in River North before a rent hike forced it to Uptown in 2018. Flint, who named the club after his time as a Navy drum major, also founded the Miss Continental Pageant in 1980, one of the most prestigious titles in American drag — a lineage that still runs through this room. The current weekly programming spans a genuine range: Friday's all-male revue, The Locker Room; Saturday's drag showcase; and Sunday's drag brunch, Sundays Are a Drag, which keeps the Baton tradition alive on a weekly cadence rather than as a museum piece.
Cover runs around $10 before 10pm for full access to the club, and the party reportedly runs late most nights. It's a complicated, layered space — part leather-bar revival, part living drag archive — and whatever the outcome of a reported trademark dispute over a competing venue elsewhere in the city, this Uptown address remains the place where Chicago's drag history and its leather-bar scene now share a roof.
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