Bar None

I like the building I live in, more or less. I like the loft itself. The once-planned screening room in the sub-basement was never finished, but who cares. Also planned, once upon a time, was a bar. This was never finished either, which is absolutely tragic.

The P.E. lofties, those lucky bastards, are getting a bar. Hell, they already have a bar in Coles, if it ever re-opens. But besides that, they are getting "The Association", some sort of dark, sexy, sophisticated bar with a private back door for the residents only, so they see how smashed they can get and still work an elevator. It should be open "This Summer". Hopefully they are using a different calendar than Coles, which opens in "May".

Across the street from Coles/Assoc, Cedd Moses and the Santa Fe have won the rights for four boozy restaurants and a "Spaceland style" music club. This has been somewhat delayed, as their Conditional Use application was originally denied. Associate Zoning Administrator Dan Green found that all that clubbing and noshing would make the neighborhood nicer, raise property values, and make this area of Skid Row a little less funky, and we can't have that, can we? Actually, what he said was:

"With a similarly large entitlement at the south at 610 South Main Street, the effect of the two projects may well put this corner "on the map" as the "in" place to be, but at the expense of the City's stated commitment to Skid Row.
...
"Permitting the sale of alcoholic beverages on the scale requested by the applicant will contribute to the incremental upgrading of the subject building and the image and character of Main Street while also contributing to the incremental dislocation of the Skid Row Community."

Mr Green also mentions a CRA brochure that defines the official borders of Skid Row, gives facts and figures, and references Skid Row's colorful history going back to the 1870's. (Dan Green has a lot more to say, including a suggestion that the restaurants be replaced with a pet food store. Read it for yourself here: Dan Green letter (pdf) )

Unfortunately for those who would preserve our historic 130+ year old Skid Row, the Central Area Planning Commission voted 5-0 to lift the prohibition back in November of last year. (The spanking is here: CAPC spanking pdf. Notice condition #105 for the bar at 110 E. 6th: The sale of distilled spirits by the bottle for same day or future consumption is prohibited. That means No bottle service. Who says the city isn't looking out for the common man? )

I don't think that ground has been broken on any of these boozers yet. We'll probably have to wait for Cedd to finish Coles before he gets into the rock club, so it could be a year or more before it opens.

Charlie O's was shut down for three weeks some two months ago. It's some kind of weird bar owners theory of time. Like one of those dreams where you are trying to run but you are up to your knees in molasses, and then you are at a company staff meeting, but naked.

"You got kicked out of King Eddy's? For what, being too clean?"
-- A Coles bartender, some years ago.

Kind Eddy's is a bit too far to stumble back from, so that leaves just the 626 wine bar, and that's not really a stumbling kind of place. So here I am, surrounded by what would be very handsome bars if they would just open up. And to make my misery complete, I have learned of a bar that was planned, permitted, but never constructed, here in my very own building! But not just any bar, no, this was special...



You see, like most other buildings here in the Bank District, my building was once a Bank. Built to be a bank. And like banks everywhere, it had a vault. The gimmick (I guess every business needs one) was that your safety deposit boxes were protected by really cool 6000lb round vault doors with gears and levers and clockwork that just looked so cool that no one would even try to steal your pre-crash stock certificates (at least not steal with drills and lock picking. The doors did nothing to protect you from theft by fountain pen.) And once upon a time, Andrew Meieran (of The Edison fame) / Marc Smith / 213 ventures planned a "speakeasy style bar" in the basement, with the vault doors as a prominent part of the decor.



The floorplans don't do it justice, but the circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back explaining what each one is are here: Bills floorplan pdf

Sweet! The place was originally slated to take up the entire basement, 12,000 square feet. Seven individual lounges, DJ booth, yada yada. Plans were approved, permits issued, everything looked good... But it never happened. Why not? Who knows. Google finds a reference to Andrew Meieran saying it was waiting on the residential construction, or somesuch. Could it still happen sometime in the future? the permits have all expired. Much of the basement has been converted to lofts, but the old part of the building with the vaults is still there, and presumably the vault doors are still there. Perhaps a smaller scale version, encompassing just the vaults themselves and the bar opposite, could still be done. It could be a sweet little watering hole, for those of us who think they can still find their floor after six martinis.

Le Sigh. When all the under-construction-maybe-someday stuff actually opens, I probably won't care very much, but for now I am really frustrated that someone else I've never met didn't risk a ton of money to build a theme bar for my extreme drinking convenience. Word.