Broke-Ass Stuart wrote a nice piece for 7x7 celebrating the bar that is Pop's, which we discovered last week is in the process of being sold:

After drinking for awhile my girlfriend at the time, Tia, and I squeezed into the photo booth apparently so we could have visual proof of our drunkenness. Inside she found a wallet with an immense amount of cash, something like $800 or $1,000. We looked at the driver’s license and luckily found the guy was still in the bar so we were happy to give him his wallet back with all the money in it. “Thanks so much, ” he sighed with the kind of relief one gets from finding out they just unknowingly dodged tragedy, “that’s for all my rent and bills for the month.” And then he gratefully bought us each a drink.

Pop’s is like that; it’s full of people that may be rough around the edges, and if you’ve been in the Mission long enough, chances are you’re gonna run into someone there you don’t like or who doesn’t like you. But at it’s heart, amongst the tags and the grime, and the dive bar smell, is a community of people who, when they find your richly laden wallet, give it back to you, fully intact. They do so because they hope you’d do the same for them, and because, when they belly up to the bar, they know they are sitting next to someone who also loves this neighborhood, one which they are struggling desperately to stay in and one they unwittingly helped change.

Read on.

[7x7 | Photo by Jeremy Brooks]