By Peter Lawrence Kane
Although not yet critically endangered, Tenderloin dive bars are vulnerable to extinction, and the price of gnashing your teeth over gentrification should be heavy patronage. Even as the Tenderloin remains dense with liquor licenses, the dives are taking an entire drinking culture with them as they disappear. For instance, while the Nite Cap kept its vertical sign, it reopened as a much fancier place, and the Deco Lounge is now Emperor Norton's Boozeland. (Although that name is falling all over itself to proclaim its hedonism, I'm pretty sure I'm never going to have sex in the basement like I did during the last incarnation.)
Almost by virtue of being nothing special, Jonell's Cocktail Lounge is special, even on a quiet Monday. Jonell's isn't a sports bar, or a gay bar, and it doesn't have artfully desecrated dollar bills taped to the walls and ceiling. Instead, there's Korean news on TV, a key-only restroom, a horseshoe-shaped bar with no beer taps, and mirrors above the bar to make the bottles pop. The bartender, somewhere around her early '60s, is just itching to chat. She offers to make popcorn, but instead opens up a four-pack of roasted nori (seemingly on the assumption that it's entirely alien to me) that she bought on sale in Daly City, and cackles over how fast I eat it.
"He'll eat anything!"
She talks up "Gangnam Style" and mentions that she's been in California for 39 years. Her day job is at the Marina Safeway, and her daughter just got married. I would love to be here at the first sign of trouble — or the first order of pinot noir — to see this woman in action.
It's sometimes a challenge to love the TL without being condescending or disrespectful, as if the human suffering is a set piece along with Jonell's wood paneling. Seeing a dog trot down the sidewalk with an unpeeled banana in its mouth, the portrait of dignity, is hilarious, but maybe its human is a little loopy. And probably nobody wants to be throwing drunks out at 1:45 a.m. while approaching the age of Medicare eligibility. Then again, what do I know? I'll get drunk in any bar whose sign has a martini glass on it, so maybe she loves the adventure, too. Her smile as she hands me some nori to go looks pretty genuine to me.
By Chris Roberts
At some bars, you watch TV. At other bars, you watch the bartender.
At Jonell's, you watch the door.
There's plenty to occupy the eyes in this bar at the corner of Jones and Ellis streets, one of the last "true dives" left in the Tenderloin. Though there are traits in common, a true dive defies definition; like true love, you know it when you see it, or you deny its existence outright.
What's undisputed is that dive bars are an endangered species. "There are like maybe four or five dives left in the Tenderloin," the voice on the other end of the phone told me, a few hours before I sat down at Jonell's horseshoe-shaped bar.
The 21 Club's long-awaited but ultimately unannounced last day of business, just three days prior, foiled a planned visit to that finest dive on Turk and Taylor; the writer who I'd planned to meet there, a longtime neighborhood resident who lived in an SRO, had left the Tenderloin for the East Coast a few weeks before that.
"I couldn't bear paying $1,000 for a cell anymore," he told me by phone. "I had enough of the insanity."
As he related this familiar-sounding story, I stared at the 21 Club's closed door and its curtained-off windows. I really wanted one last drink there. Like your youth, once a dive goes, it's gone forever. You can buy kitsch; you can't buy authenticity.
I think about this as I order another $3 Budweiser from the bartender at Jonell's. She's an ageless Korean woman who insists I call her "Mama" and is flabbergasted that $2 only buys you two songs on her jukebox. As I drink, two neighborhood locals — black men who look comfortable on the street — appear, taking seats at the horseshoe leg closest to the door. Neither is drinking: One has a water in front of him, the other one a Red Bull. They're turned away from me, Mama, and the baseball game on TV, and they're staring out the open door.
I've frequented Tenderloin dives for the better part of 10 years. If you asked me why, why I watched the final out of the 2010 World Series at a near-silent Brown Jug — as a street denizen rolled a blunt at my table, declining the offer of a drink — or why I take out-of-towners to the Geary Club rather than North Beach, I would give you no real reason. I would say something about loud crowds or people or conversations that I wanted to avoid. I might mumble something about this "authenticity." If I were honest with you, maybe I'd say I liked drinking in dive bars with working-class alcoholics because it was an escape — for me.
Whatever troubles I had, they were nothing compared to their problems. When slumming it became uncomfortable, I had options. I could always leave the TL and go back to my stable apartment, my job, and my life. I could go home; the SRO-dweller I'd just bought a drink for was home.
And now, those homes are going away.
I watch the Jonell's patrons watching the door. If the Tenderloin trend continues, this place will eventually be an upscale cocktail lounge, the liquor license sold for the price of a house. Whatever they're waiting for, it's coming. It's only a matter of time.
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