We are the best! So says SFBG's Best of the Bay readers' poll. DNA Lounge won Best Overall Party Venue (for the fifth year in a row!) as well as Best Bar Staff, along with our monthly parties Bootie: "Best Overall Dance Party"; Trannyshack: "Best Drag Show"; and Hubba Hubba Revue: "Best Burlesque Show"!

Congratulations and thank you to everyone who made these parties happen, and thanks to you for voting!

Meanwhile, back at the job site, this happened:

First they drilled holes in the wall and bolted a steel track to it; then they mounted the saw on that track and cut the concrete with a 24" diamond-tipped blade. It was incredibly loud.

They sawed the wall out in sections, then kicked the slabs over onto a pile of tires. Then they broke them up with jackhammers and carried the pieces out. It was very messy. They sprayed water on the drill while cutting to keep the dust down (turning it into a river of mud instead of a white cloud) but apparently not enough, because the dust got everywhere. Since we're open tonight, we had to bring in a cleaning crew this afternoon to spend many hours dusting the club from top to bottom -- like, taking down every bottle and wiping it off by hand. Good times.

Sadly, I have not yet been able to walk fully between the buildings, because so far one side or another has always been boxed off. I was hoping for one of those moments like when a tunnel-boring machine breaks through, and the two crews shake hands and drink champagne. Alas, it was not to be.

Here's a picture of some of the ancient square rebar inside our hundred-year-old walls, and here's a curiously intact slab of wall on its way out. Good day, wall. I SAID GOOD DAY.

I guess the opposite of "rebar" is "bar", and we've got the skeleton of one of those too:

There was a lot of plumbing work going on on the DNA Pizza ceiling to hook up this bar's drains and sinks, so between the pipe all over the floor, the guys on ladders with torches and the apocalyptic level of demolition noise, I'm surprised we had any customers at all! We still did, though. It didn't scare everybody away.

I have inflicted a pretty major redesign upon the DNA Lounge web site. What do you think? Let me know how it works for you.