Our first installment in a series of reviews of local Blazers bars looks at the hip establishment right next to the Rose Quarter
Young men in their late twenties and early thirties, shirts
checked; young women in bright colored blouses; jeans aplenty; a pair of cowboy
boots, tennis sneakers, a few loafers. A
pair of oxfords, for some reason, but (mercifully) not a pleat in sight.
Pink young faces yell at the screen. They are all dressed in Timbers uniforms or
green shirts. Passing through the sea of
people involves reading strange sentences like “NAGBE NAGBE NAGBE TIMBERS
VALERI VALERI PORTLAND TIMBERS JOHNSON,” punctuated with big green and yellow
blank spaces and too many numbers to count.
The first half is at its close, we’re in extra time, and
Portland leads for once going into the break—a rare feat this season of
come-from-behind victories. Everyone
seems pleased, almost relieved. Valeri
sends a ball up perfectly and everyone yells but nothing comes of it and they
all shrug it off as the opposing team kicks it to the sideline. Everyone watches the throw in, tense, hoping
for one more shot at the goal. One more
tense yell and hands are held, friends grasp each other and tug on each other’s
shirts, people pause and look.
But then the ball just gets knocked away to the other side
of the pitch and the ref blows the whistle.
Some people go to the restrooms at the back, most go to the big wide bar,
38 feet long and made out of an old basketball court. Everyone is standing there, finding spots to
ask for drinks. The three people working
the bar are flinging around pints of craft IPA’s as fast as they can.
Sounds like an excellent sports bar, indeed. Soccer, jerseys, even down to the bar itself. Except it isn’t. Spirit of ‘77, despite its name, is not
really a sports bar. It’s a bar celebrating sports culture.
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What’s the difference?
I turned to the couple next to me at one of the tables. Daniel and Laura Hunter, 29 and 27, are here to watch the
Blazers game. But they went here because
sports bars usually resemble something divey.
And Spirit of ‘77 entirely lacks that element.
“We wanted some place nice where the food was good,” said
Laura. “Other places can be a little sketch.” Daniel agreed. “People get crazy,” he said. “When Lillard hit that game-winner against
the Cavs early last season, yeah, I was at a sports bar for that”—he then named
the bar—“and people went nuts. They started
chucking chairs around, throwing things.
They broke glasses and didn’t care they were so happy.”
At Spirit of ‘77 the enthusiasm is real when the game is on,
as I just saw, and during the basketball season (that green and yellow sea now
red and black) something quite remarkable.
The place was filled to capacity during last season’s playoff games
versus the Rockets and Spurs and—during the Rockets series especially—occasionally
resembled the bar Daniel attended.
But what is so remarkable about Spirit of ‘77—and so
impossible at those other joints—is the way the place can so easily become convivial,
like that of an intermission at a play or a performance, seamlessly and without
too much transformation. Going to Spirit
of ‘77 is more like attending a small concert with a local band than pounding warpainted
chests on the sidelines during a Seahawks game.
This transition into a chatty, comfortable atmosphere is what
is going on now. People drift over to
the skeeball game. They put a quarter in
and it doesn’t work. Decoration, they
guess, and go over to the foosball table, which better be working—it is rumored
to have cost $5000—where two people who were playing throughout the game spin
their players excitedly and a group watches.
Everyone else is murmuring and ignoring the halftime show.
Others make their way over to the four arcade basketball
hoops, which reside in a wooden custom-built housing that matches the
surroundings. Blue freethrow lines are hand-painted
underneath the baskets, which rattle as a bevy of six-inch balls bounce off of
them, shot by a small army of contestants who rotate and take turns, smiling.
Above glow the lights in the large sign over the bar. It is a marquee, but can pass for a scoreboard
too. It says “SPIRIT OF ‘77” in the
woodsy pioneer typeface used in the bar’s logo, which doesn’t quite have much
to do with the Blazers, and yet satisfies in its boldness, lit up with almost
orangeish dim lightbulbs, three or four of them burnt out.
--
Landlord Robert Sacks and operators Jack Barron and Nate
Tilden were clearly intent on creating this relaxed atmosphere from the
beginning. A bar that celebrated the
area, the history, even as it worked fulfilling most of the traditional functions of a sports bar.
This
was 2010, when there seemed to be a noticeable absence of a standard,
default Blazers bar right next to the Rose Quarter. So it was an ambitious idea exactly right for the times.
The building was beautiful, built in 1912, and if the trendy
nightlife bar that served as the previous occupant ignored this completely,
Barron and Tilden were not going to make the same mistake.
It was from the design of architect A.E. Doyle, of the
trendsetting Doyle and Patterson firm which built much of the ambitious and
classy revival-style work in the downtown, and one of the few that managed to
escape the major demolition involved in the heavy redevelopment of the Lloyd
District in the 1950s. It somehow was placed exactly so as to avoid both the
construction the freeway, which runs right underneath MLK at that intersection,
and the Convention Center—across the street from which it now stands.
The style of the building is much less flamboyant than
certain of Doyle’s other buildings, and was repainted it a rather drab gray which
takes away many of its wonderful external features—which include formal cornices,
subtle columns in relief, and a wonderful entryway proportioned to the golden
ratio, all so classical the building
seems almost exotic. The only major external
change was a big “THIS IS RIP CITY” sign visible from the freeway, which was originally
planned to be in neon until the city killed that idea.
Barron and Tilden seem mostly concerned with using the
outside as a shield against the heavy traffic on both MLK and Lloyd, and the
sounds of the freeway. During the hot
summer days they will open one back window to the street, but it is clear
outside seating was never in the plans.
Fresh from their success at the fashionably-restored Clyde Common
building, they seem instead convinced that it is the quality of the inside
space which makes a bar work.
So they used money from the Portland Development Comission
to work on the storefront, and put most of their effort on cleaning up the
inside, leaving the exposed brick, replacing the rafters with bright new warm
wood, and making the old 3,000 square foot old warehouse feel roomy and cozy.
They meticulously hung memorabilia of a
tasteful kind on the walls. There are
pictures of the whole ‘77 team, other Portland amateur teams, and strange
custom shirts and sayings framed all along the walls. Behind the bar knickknacks pile up, including
a box of Wheaties with Bill Walton on them, trophies, and a white Walton
autographed ball.
When the bar opened on the Blazers 30th anniversary, it
accordingly became a fixture of the Blazers scene. Initially, it was celebrated as the default
Blazers’ bar, no other establishment being so close to where the games were
played. It claimed that lofty title
until the
opening of Dr. Jack’s on the Rose Quarter grounds right across from the
stadium in March of this year.
Nevertheless, Spirit of ‘77 still remains a fixture of the Blazers bar
scene.
--
Still, the reputation of the place is not so much for its affiliation
with the action going on down the street, so much as its comfortable and cache
setting. I catch Greg Alfano, 34, at the
bar, trying to get a pint for his friends and some of the good-looking,
good-tasting nachos to share. He works
at a bank downtown during the day, and he’s come in a workshirt. “If you want something a little more upscale
for guests or new acquaintances or for business meetings, this is the place to
go.”
He gets the drinks but is in no rush and doesn’t mind
talking to me. “It’s full of lots of
people from all over the city. It can
get packed. But there’s no crowd,
really.”
I ask whether this would seem to make the place rather too sanitized
and anonymous for a sports bar, and he says no.
“Actually that makes it work.
Everyone is having a good time in their own way. And then someone will score a goal and people
will all go crazy together.”
It isn’t clear whether this sort of venture will replace the
typical sports bars in Portland, or just remain another variation of them. Just cleaning up the venue won’t stop
passionate Portland fans from throwing chairs every once and a while in
celebration—I’m fairly certain of that.
But is there something missing from such a place, on some
level, if there aren’t the types of chairs around that are easy to break? Just a couple weeks ago, when the Matador
closed, the Mercury wondered whether
the dive-ier bars around Portland were dying out. Should we add the genuine sports bar—the sports
bar without gourmet food, whose pennants and banners aren’t there for “vintage”
effect—to that list of endangered species?
Then again, why shouldn’t someone want to go to some place
where sports was being shown on the TV, and yet not actually want to have the
quality of their night hinge on the outcome of the game itself?
There’s something, indeed, less sporting about such an outing, and yet that only shows how ambitious is the concept behind the bar. In many ways the possibility of
such a night out—a night out that could be very well catered to by Spirit of ‘77—represents
everything positive happening in sports today, where fandom has become not only
a the pride of an insular group of rabid, raving face-painted monsters but a
cultural enthusiasm able to be shared by all types, where sports is the
ultimate form of reality TV.
And it would be a mistake to see in this something contrary
to the nature of the sporting life in Portland.
Indeed, of the amazing things about Blazermania is that it was at the
forefront of such a movement. While we
haven’t had a championship since 1977, except for a couple brief periods in the
interim we haven’t lost interest in our team, ever. This makes the attitude of Portland fans
infinitely different from the Midwest fatalism hanging over the Cleveland or
Bucks, or the perpetual dissatisfaction which has hung over the Knicks since
their last championship.
And so it is perhaps fitting that the bar is named Spirit of ‘77. Just because it puts up vintage posters,
doesn’t mean it is condemned to merely commemorate and memorialize. Such a venture lives because of living spirit—one
that is not so much concentrated in the following of a particular team, as
diffused through a city in the sports culture created when that team won it all.
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