▼ Our Story · Frank Caven
One man.
One block.
The whole welcome.
Frank Caven did not invent gay Dallas. He just bought a building on Cedar Springs in 1969, painted it dark, and kept the door open. Everything you can see on the block today started inside that building. This is his story.
▼ The Founder
Frank
Caven.
Frank Caven came to Dallas with a quiet conviction and a loud taste in music. He believed that a bar could be more than a bar — that it could be a living room for people who weren’t allowed living rooms anywhere else. In 1969, he signed a lease on a low-slung building at the corner of Cedar Springs and Throckmorton, painted it dark, and turned the lights down.
The block, at the time, was a strip of garages, dry cleaners, and dim windows. The city wasn’t sure what to make of it. Frank was. He opened the door, hired the right bartenders, paid the right musicians, and started saying yes — to drag, to dancing, to women who had nowhere else to drink, to men who’d been turned away on the other side of town. Word travelled the way it always does. Slowly, then all at once.
By the mid-seventies, Frank had three rooms on the same block. The biggest of them, The Old Plantation, drew DJs from Houston and Atlanta and dancers from every corner of Texas. By the early eighties, the block had a nickname — The Strip, then later The Crossroads. Frank didn’t take credit. He didn’t put his name on the doors. He hired locals, promoted from the floor, and reinvested every dollar that came across the bar back into the building.
When he died in 1986, he left a company that ran itself, a community that ran itself, and a block that has not gone dark a single night since.
The work he started is the work we still do.
Open the door. Pour a good drink. Don’t ask anybody to be anyone but who they are.
▼ Frank’s Timeline
A life on the block.
Every year on this list is a year somebody walked through a door they thought might be locked. Frank made sure it wasn’t.
Frank is born.
Texas, between the wars. He grows up quiet, plays piano, and listens to everything that comes through the radio.
Frank signs the lease.
A garage on Cedar Springs, painted dark by the end of the summer. The first Caven door is a back door — most of them were, in those days.
Doors open.
The first Caven venue welcomes its first crowd. The block starts to feel like home for a community that didn’t have many.
The Old Plantation.
Frank opens a second room down the block — bigger floor, bigger speakers, a sound system that draws DJs from Houston and Atlanta. The Throckmorton Mining Company will grow out of this building a decade later. Today it’s Station 4.
The block has a name.
Locals start calling Cedar Springs and Throckmorton “the Crossroads.” The name sticks. Frank doesn’t care what anyone calls it as long as the lights stay on.
The Rose Room is born.
Frank gives drag a stage of its own. Generations of performers cut their first numbers here. They still come back.
Frank passes.
He leaves behind a company that knows what to do, a staff that runs it, and a block that does not go dark for a single night. The lights stay on. They have stayed on.
The block keeps the lease.
JR’s joins in 1990. Sue Ellen’s in 1999. Station 4 opens in the old Plantation building in 2004. In 2018, the Texas Historical Commission marks The Crossroads as a place of cultural significance. Cheat Code Lounge opens in 2022. Frank’s rule is still the rule.
▼ What Frank Left
Four rules,
still on the wall.
A door, not a velvet rope.
Frank’s first rule, still the rule: anyone who shows up is welcome. No type, no scene, no dress code beyond decency. The door is open. The drink is good. That’s the deal.
A block, not a building.
Frank bought rooms one at a time and never tried to make them the same. Six venues today, six different feelings, one neighborhood.
A staff, not a corporation.
Frank promoted from the floor. So do we. Many of the people running the company started behind the bar twenty, thirty, forty years ago.
A neighborhood, not a market.
Frank stayed on the block when it would have been easier to leave it. We’ve stayed too. The Crossroads is the company. The company is the Crossroads.
▼ In Frank’s Memory
His door is open.
Read the history, then come walk the block. Six rooms. One welcome. Frank is still here, in every one of them.