SFist Reprint

A weekly reaffirmation that the only thing better than going out boozing is reading about going out boozing. By barrespondent, Drew.

Gentrification is an overused term to be sure. Looking around the whole Bay Area these days, we're stuck drawing the conclusion that every single square foot of the entire city is slowly succumbing to the lumbering beast that is middle to upper-class gentrifying. No matter how dank and dangerous your local watering hole is now, in 20 years it's probably going to look like a Planet Hollywood.

Something that confuses us as we get older, however, is that as neighborhoods and bars are redone to appeal to the young, hip and affluent, that we fit less and less into any of those categories, and places that we liked for being dingy, dirty and out of the way are now loud, overly clean 'clubs' full of kids whose musical tastes we just don't get. And while it would be easy to say, "Well, that's just how it goes.", we have to remember that we are bitter old cranks that hate change (shakes fist).

The Abbey on Geary used to have the imagined look and feel of a pub in suburban Dublin. Never crowded, friendly while at the same time being appropriately suspicious of outsiders and more likely to have a guy show up and play the hurdy-gurdy than spin a crate full of awful '90s R&B records. As a former resident of the Inner Richmond, I was shocked at how crowded the streets were around The Abbey on a Saturday night. Throngs of twenty-somethings loudly made their way from Emo-blasting Ireland 32 to The Bitter End to the retro-pumping Abbey. Arrggh, This is not our scene at all!

Any sense of friendly neighborhoodiness seems to have been surgically removed from The Abbey. Once inside, you could be at any mediocre bar on any college campus in the country. Drinks are neither unique or any kind of bargain, and the crowd is intolerable for more than 15 minutes. An annoying blend of meat-market scenesters and Seth Cohen wanna-bes. It would be so much less of a shame if we didn't remember what this place used to be like.

So unless you are under 25, enjoy shouting over ironic music that no one seems to find ironic (Is that double irony?), and fighting through a sea of backwards baseball hats to overpay for a Coors Light, you might want to take a vow against The Abbey.

Liver... Out!!