Tenderloin / Civic Center

Just Your Average Saturday Night at Hi-Tide

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |

Hi-Tide Lounge: drink until you puke out your eyes.

Reader Neb sent this along:

The Hi-Tide Lounge on Geary is definitely my kind of place and one even the TL locals call “very strange.” After once being greeted with “Who next? You order drink now” by the most efficient bartender in SF, I've been set ever since with $3 draft beers.  Above the bar is a portrait of a bare-breasted woman with a Mona Lisa-like look that follows you around the room. $1 pool and dangling electrical wires add to the overall ambiance.

Well, [Saturday night], after a couple rounds in with a groups of friends, a belligerently drunk guy claiming to be ex-military gets into a screaming match with the sole bartender after smashing a barstool against the jukebox. The guy seriously won't leave and finally after 5 minutes a guy group of guys rally to push this dude out the door. He stands outside continuing to scream and yell like anyone cares. I grab my vintage generation iPhone and crappily film the last few minutes. You can still spot the guy at the end of the clip.

The first 30 seconds, a screaming match between drunkBro and the most efficient bartender in SF, is the real highlight of the video, so you might want to cut yourself off early.  Also, I haven't been to the Hi-Tide in years.  Anyone up for a TL barcrawl?

In One Hole and Out the Other

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |

Earlier today, I stepped outside for a breath of fresh air and my 3rd burrito in 16 hours only to find that someone stole both my neighbor's and my crappy, decaying doormats.  Slightly annoyed at the fact I will no longer be able to wipe the dog shit off my kicks onto an ugly print of flowers, I decided to mention my plight to my friend Ben.  “Whatever, this is what my buddy has to put up with in the Tendernob.”

Update: Turns Out Our Bathroom Critic Got the Price of Coors at Dirty Thieves Wrong

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |

Paul, owner of Dirty Thieves, who must have been reading this blog by accident, emailed us a correction:

[The tagger] wrote on our bathroom walls that it is four bucks; we charge three for Coors.  If you were charged four, I apologize.  If you were basing your story on some bathroom graffiti rendering of our menu, well that's still my fault for not painting over the graffiti—it's a tough bathroom to keep clean and an even more difficult to keep the toilet in working condition.  In any case, I own the bar and cannot stomach the idea that someone was charged four bucks for a Coors.  I also own two other bars in sf and will be working at Whiskey Thieves this wednesday (839 Geary) from 5-8.  As penance for, at the very least, not painting over graffiti, I will charge one dollar for Coors during my shift. Once again, 5-8 this Wednesday.

In case you don't understand what he's saying: it's a crime against humanity to be charged $4 for Coors (it is).  Anyway, go drink up for cheap folks!  Might I recommend drinking your non-light Coors as a Stranahan's chaser, which distilled mere blocks away from Coors Field in downtown Denver.

Also: we love bathroom graffiti.

Previously on Uptown Almanac: 

No More Excuses For Mesherle

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |

I saw in the SF Appeal that Police Chief Gascon doesn't expect any “problems” in San Francisco following the verdict in the Oscar Grant trail: “[there is] absolutely no evidence… that will lead us to believe there will be any problems [in San Francisco].”   Now, I clearly don't have a pulse on what's going on in the city activist ring like the police, but just walking around the city, it's hard not to come across a lot of Oscar Grant street art, suggesting that people in SF give a shit about the outcome and are clearly motivated enough to vandalize property even before the verdict.  Is that not evidence of potential unrest?  For example, one of my favorite Flickr users, Terry B., snapped the above Banksy-esque poster on Linden St. yesterday.  Or you can just roll to Valencia.

Then again, anyone interested in smashing windows will probably just head over to Oakland.

(photo by terry.b)

Cool Kid Travels: Eau de Crooklyn?

— By Jenny Wilson |

Last week I was in Brooklyn and stumbled across Bond No. 9's latest scent “Brooklyn.'” The Brooklyn perfume consists of a combination of grapefruit, cardamom, cypress-wood, geranium leaves, juniper berrie, cesarwood, leather and guaiacwood, (wtf is that?)  and for a mere $220 you can actually “smell like” Brooklyn. Don't really know where they came up with this weird ass combo to encapsulate the scent of the “edgy metropolis.” To me Crooklyn smells like wasted youth and decaying bodies but, I guess that really isn't marketable.

If San Francisco's neighborhoods were bottled up into different perfumes, what would these neighborhoods smell like? And what is the price you'd have to pay to smell like them?

Mission: Taco trucks, piss, cheap beer, expensive coffee, trustafarians. Price: One call to your parents to please, please, please let you use daddy's Amex one more time.

Haight: Drum circles, midwestern runaways that didn't get the memo that punk is dead (see: dirt, b.o., and dreadlocks), bong loads, DMT. Price: Panhandle for 48 hrs straight and pray some unwitting tourists feel bad for your 3 dogs.

Marina: The scent of entitlement, hair product, fake tanner, axe body spray, shame, chest bumps! Price: The cost of running for mayor.

Tenderloin: Crack, garbage, meth, cheap blow jobs (see: rotting teeth), poor life decisions. Price: Eagerness to give cheap blow jobs.

Noe Valley: Upwardly mobile snobbery, babies, french bulldogs (read: shit), the new car smell. Price:  Raising 2 kids, paying for private school, a vasectomy

Sunset: Isolation, depression, pseudo suburbia. Price: Moving anywhere else in the city

Castro: Rainbows, unicorns, leather daddy's leather, lube. Price: An evening at Boy Bar.

Chinatown: fish, lost tourists, the dirty 30, dumpsters. Price: Shitting yourself.

North Beach: Pizza! bros, day old strippers. Price: One lap dance.

If you have anymore ideas go ahead and throw them into the comments, and if you want to add anymore neighbs that I didn't cover, i.e. Pac Heights (I'm not sure what rich smells like) go ahead and do it.

SF Neighborhoods in T-Shirt Form

— By Kevin Montgomery (@kevinmonty) |

I'm pretty sure these shirts are a meme from yesteryear and I always hate being late to the lolparty, however these things date wayyy back to 2008, a year before anyone read San Francisco blogs.  Anywho, the only thing I don't like about these shirts are that there are only four of them.  Make more, design nerds!  LIke a shirt of the Richmond featuring a fog monster eating a frat boy, or a shirt of the Mission featuring a fog monster eating a frat boy in a hoodie.

Anyway, these pieces of fashionable hyper-local cotton were created at the sexy people at Ape Do Good Printing.  Unfortunately, I cannot find a link to buy these shirts, which is such an epic first world problem it makes me want cry.

For those of you who want to actually buy a neighborhood shirt, Headline Shirts has an alternate.

(photos ripped straight from the Ape Do Good Printing flickr stream.  Hat tip to Generic via ??? via ??? god this tumblr shit is hard)

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