“This is a bar I’ve passed by on hundreds of occasions, but never actually been in,” said “Nathan” as we sat at the bar of The Phoenix, on Valencia. “I really like it.”
There’s nothing “special” about The Phoenix in the way we usually mean it: distinct and unique. It has a copper sheet covering its long bar, and a hot pink pool table in the back that has lots of endearing wear and tear, but fundamentally it is “just” an Irish pub. But The Phoenix is “special” in the sense that it is a great example of the form.
“Irish bars in particular, of all the forms of bars out there, are wonderful at creating an immediate sense of home,” I agreed. “I think it’s tied into the notion, across much of the U.K., that taverns are ‘public houses,’ that even more than a place of business, it’s a kind of community center, and that just comes through.”
“Yeah,” Nathan said. “I remember going to an Irish bar in Bangkok, of all places, and it was definitely different, but it still felt very much like this, it still had that sense that this was a place you immediately belong.”
He took in the atmosphere again. “Anyway, you’ve gotta love a bar that plays Grateful Dead deep cuts.”
“For sure,” I agreed. The bartender came over, and we both ordered a bottle of Magners cider. There’s nothing “special” about the drinks at The Phoenix in any sense of the word. It’s just booze.
My tastes generally run to Belgian beers and extremely ambitious cocktails, but I have come to appreciate bars like this more over the last few years, because I used to have more places in San Francisco where I felt at home. So many of the small theaters and oddball spaces and artists warehouses are gone now … I don’t know where exactly I belong here, anymore. That makes a bar where I can just walk in and feel at home far more important, even if I’m not actually interested in their drinks.
“Did you tell me this place is going to close down?” Nathan asked.
“Probably,” I said sadly. “I’m not entirely clear on the details, but my understanding is that demolition permits have been issued to tear the building down, and the owner wants to replace it with … condos? I think? Isn’t it always condos? They tried to do it a couple of years ago and it didn’t work, maybe this time it will.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Yeah. Every time an Irish bar closes, a leprechaun gets his AA chip.”
We clinked bottles, and sighed.
It had been a rough week for both of us. A mutual friend had gone missing; missing as in a missing person’s report was filed and for five days nobody knew where she was. A massive search effort had been undertaken. I took time over a couple of days to go through parts of Golden Gate Park I knew she liked, and she’d eventually been found a few days ago. Now we were waiting for word about how she is. Nathan had reached out to me that morning to see how I was doing, and I asked if he wanted to get a drink later in the day.
I’d been planning to go to The Phoenix anyway, but it was particularly appropriate to have him come along, because Nathan had just left San Francisco and moved to the South Bay, where he and his girlfriend could, just barely, afford a house.
He’d finished the move last week, and then, immediately after, had to move the business he’s an office manager for from San Francisco to the South Bay, too. He’d finished that this week.
“Literally every object in my life has been put in a box and shipped somewhere, and now needs to be unpacked and rearranged,” he said. “I’m completely disaggregated. Literally everything, now needs to find a new place to go.”
Nathan is one of my favorite collaborators, and a good friend. Losing him is a blow, although he’s only an hour or so away. Theoretically he could still be an active part of my life. We’d just need to figure out how.
“I’m definitely detached from the hive mind,” he acknowledged. “I already don’t really know what’s going on here anymore.”
“On many levels, business as usual,” I said, thinking in particular that it’s been weeks now since any bar asked me to mask up or see my vax card. We’d just walked in, sat down, and ordered like that’s just what you do.
The indifference to the pandemic is reminding me of the way I was afraid of earthquakes when I first moved here. I kept wondering: “How can people not live every moment aware that we are about to fall into the ocean, becoming the next Atlantis? They’ll tell stories about our decadent ways for a thousand years to come!”
Then … I just got used to it. The way people do. Now I can’t find my go bag.
But the earthquake is still out there, waiting. As is the next viral variant.
In other ways, San Francisco is going crazy. “Have you heard about our redistricting fiasco?” I asked him.
“Yeah, that did break through to me,” Nathan said. “That sounds like an incredible mess.”
“It seems like the same madness that’s gripping the rest of the country. So many guardrails that we never really appreciated have been ripped away, and now nothing’s stopping us from throwing each other off this cliff.”
“You can do what I do, and blame neoliberalism for everything,” he said. He was being self-deprecating, but also serious.
“It’s not just that it’s commoditized everything,” he explained. “It’s that it’s reduced the symbolic vocabulary we have … we’re not just suffering, it’s taken away the ways we have of communicating that suffering to one another. We don’t even know how to point at what’s wrong and identify it.”
We were both drinking slowly. Honestly, I don’t think either of us really felt like drinking at all. The point was to be here. We’d been sitting outside at a cafe before we’d walked over to The Phoenix, and while the cafe was good and the outdoor seating was lovely, it was when we walked into this bar and sat right down and felt at home that the conversation had really shifted into gear. The effect of the atmosphere was noticeable.
“Conservatism has gone batshit crazy just as the world has become an experiment conclusively proving the value of Burkean conservatism,” I agreed.
“What’s that?”
“Edmund Burke was an influential British writer and parliamentarian who said that the really important things in a culture are the unwritten traditions and social norms that it follows. That those have much more of an impact, and are more important to keeping things going, than the laws and the official rules.”
“Right.”
“And so while you want there to be progress, you want to move things forward, you have to do it slowly so that you don’t damage those norms more quickly than new ones can take their place, and you want to work with a culture’s values rather than against it. You justify progress by calling upon values they already have, not but insisting on new values that people don’t … well … value.”
“That does seem to be an issue,” Nathan agreed.
There was a long pause.
“God, I hope we make it,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m temperamentally optimistic, but intellectually pessimistic.”
The Phoenix brings out my optimism, which I suspect that any place which feels like home will. Which is why we need places like that. It’s hard to put a word to what we lose as they disappear around us, one by one.
See also:
Permit issued to demolish The Phoenix on Valencia Street
The stalled plan to demolish The Phoenix and build 19 units has risen again. Back in 2018, the owner of the Irish pub The Phoenix, at 811 Valencia St., submitted plans to demolish the one-story watering hole to develop a six-story mixed-use building with 19 “Single Room Occupancy” units. Last week, the project received demolition…
Calls to boycott Phoenix Pub after owner fires seven female employees
Signs have gone up in the Mission urging patrons to boycott the Phoenix Irish Pub on Valencia Street to protest a decision by its owner to fire seven female employees. The signs read: “Shitty business practices!! The owner fired entire female bar staff (not male staff) without any warning or reason and lied about closing…
