Look how they massacred my boy

I remember exactly where I was when I first heard about it. I was working at home and I got a text from my friend Olu. It had a link to the story in the SF Standard and he said “Wait… could this era be somehow worse than the dot com boom?!?”

I read the story and I remember thinking “Oh, this is an early April Fool’s joke like Bold Italic used to do” (in fact, I wrote one of them). Then I started searching up¹ the names and stuff and it slowly dawned on me, this isn’t a joke, it’s just part of the waking nightmare that defines everyday life.

Toronado is being sold. To someone whom, by all accounts, is a crypto bro.

Before we get into the article, some background. Toronado is a bar in San Francisco’s Lower Haight that for some 30-odd years has been a temple to craft beer and its adherents. “No frills” is too nice a way to describe Toronado, which is the architectural and sensual equivalent of a fat mid-30s guy with a beard and flannel, which also describes much of the clientele. It’s a fantastic, homey place, dedicated to the love of beer and the rapturous imbibement of same. I’ve been going there for something close to 30 years.

I sort of vaguely knew it was for sale, but I never imagined this:

Hard as it may be to believe, “Orion Parrott” is apparently a real person and “Orange DAO” is apparently a thing of some kind. You can see why I thought it was a joke at first; they refer to themselves as “Chads”? And you want to build a great food and beverage brand? Man, fuck you.

Why is this so infuriating? Because bit by bit, the San Francisco we used to know and love is being torn down and replaced by something much worse. Punk dive bar Hemlock is torn down and becomes HEMLOCK corporate event space. Gold Dust Lounge is forced out of Union Square to make way for a Limited clothing store that then… closes. Lucky 13 closed so they could build condos (which, fine, I’m all for new housing, are they built yet?)

And now Toronado. Which isn’t closing so much as becoming something way more awful and unrecognizable. With a “meme coin,” whatever the fuck that is. I have no idea what a meme coin is but I want to see the first interaction when Orion T. Feathers asks a longtime patron if he wants one.

Here is where I have to reconcile two apparently contradictory emotions I often express publicly and hope no one notices: ONE, I think it’s a mistake to encase the city in amber and never allow progress and use that as an excuse to never tear anything down and never let anything get built. TWO, please don’t change or upset things I PERSONALLY like. I mean, I think you should be able to put up a 6-story residential building basically anywhere in the city you want, ESPECIALLY the Richmond and Sunset, but PLEASE don’t take away Golden Boy pizza or, God forbid, Zeitgeist.

Here’s a pertinent example: the closure of the Great Highway. To hear it from people on Nextdoor, this is the nail in the coffin for San Francisco, the closure of a highway that runs for two miles and serves a couple thousand people at best. I voted to close it and turn it into a park, which I think is a much better use for a strip of land that’s going to have to close eventually anyway and that mostly helps westside residents get to Daly City in their cars. Does that make me the crypto bro in this story? To them I’m sure it does, but I tend to think that a neighborhood institution like Toronado is just qualitatively different from a two-mile stretch of asphalt that cuts car commutes by a few minutes.

The purchase of Toronado seems like a weird middle ground. It’s not like Wonderboy is saying he’s gonna shut the business down and build a crypto whatever-they-have. He’s saying he’s going to use the skin of Toronado and strip it and shamble around in it like Vincent D’Onofrio in Men in Black.

Because these guys can’t make cool themselves, they have to buy cool and then assume the trappings of the cool they bought.

Late in the day came the denial - “SF's cherished Toronado beer bar has not been sold, real estate agent says,” so maybe the deal will fall through or maybe someone else has stepped up with an offer, I don’t know. I know this won’t be the last time this comes up. C’est la vie.

1  My daughter, who just turned 12, introduced me to the term “search up” for “searching online” and a brief survey reveals that this terminology is routine among the Youth, so much so that she thinks it’s funny that I just say “search.” Me using “search up” is an example of me trying to adopt cool mannerisms because I’m not cool, as discussed more below.