Call To Action – Save The Eagle Tavern!

San Francisco has been getting a nasty rep for losing its edge for a while now, and with only 49 some square miles of land to occupy it’s not hard to see how things can get a little homogenous with the right variables at play. Of these, one be the urban property sitch. Landlords still wield more power than they’d like to admit and when it comes to commercial space, there isn’t much that protects businesses, no matter how long they’ve been there. Bars come and go in this town, but a handful goes on to become institutions that francisqueños cherish as equally as sunny days and getting trashed on Sunday afternoons.

The Eagle has been providing many a sleazy variation on all of these components for decades, but that shall come to an end at the finish of April if all goes according to plan. The new property owner has given the management of the bar two weeks to clear out, so as to make way for everything from condos to a more mainstream establishment, according to rumours. (Yay! More metallic boxes are precisely what South of Market needs!) Also, I imagine space must be at a premium these days, what with all that tax shelter business going on.

The bar business is a bizarre and rather insular world, so there is probably a lot more going on here than what‘s readily apparent, but it would be awful if the Eagle had to join its fabled ilk in that special corner of the city’s elephant graveyard set aside for the dirty, weird and wonderful that made this city what it once was.

If you’d like to chime in what you think should happen to this treasure trove of bikers, bands, beers and queers or maybe just get a little more info on what the hell is going on, show up tomorrow (04/11/11) at the bar where SoMa’s own Anna Conda has thrown together an impromptu call to action meeting.

Seriously, though, for a city fond of blasting the banal expanses that carpet the southern floodplains of our fair state, this city is getting awfully fond of all things monochromatic. What happened to all that end of the rainbow/freaks at the edge-of-the-world malarkey, anyway?