Longstanding Valencia Street bar Blondie's always seems to evoke mixed reactions from SFist's commenter community, from those who say things like "this place was over run by young bankers and dot.com 1.0 douchebags back in the day" and "a friend and I were supposed to meet another friend at Blondie's. The bouncer wouldn't let us in because we were both wearing sneakers." But a recent interview with the bar's proprietor suggests that she might be just as over some of her joint's patrons as you guys are.
In a lengthy interview with Mission Local, bar manager Nicole DeWald recalls the phone call she received in 1990 while "'flailing' in her college studies of drama and music."
"Hey, I just bought a bar and named it after you. You’re gonna run it,” her mother, Ricci Cornell told her, having just purchased the building. Blondie's opened in 1991, in a space that has held various bars since 1937.
The rest is history, as DeWald learned "how to run a bar by trial and error at 21."
Though the Mission Local piece glosses over the dot com 1.0 complaints raised by SFist commenters, noting only that "In the mid-nineties, DeWald started having live music several nights a week, which brought in more clientele — often a cleaner-cut crowd with steady employment" it dives full-on into These Troubled Times, saying that "The concern about rude young newcomers is widespread."
“Millennials don’t have much respect for their surroundings," DeWald says.
Example? A young man, part of a group celebrating some kind of business success (DeWald suspected it was the acquisition of their tech startup), walked behind the bar with a fistful of cash. He tossed it in the air and let it fall to the floor, announced he was ‘making it rain,’ and demanded a drink.“The crackheads, the prostitutes, et cetera, that I don’t miss,” De Wald said. “but the entitlement of the people moving here is equally as ugly.”
She wasn’t sure if the man was thrown out of the bar, but she does recall that he was persuaded to pick up his bar-floor-residue soaked money.
“People who live in the city have a certain amount of respect for the city,” DeWald said. Still, only one kind of person is unwelcome in the bar: “It’s the people that don’t give a shit that I don’t wanna see.”
He was "persuaded"? Now that's a persuasion I would have liked to see.
Previously: Now Blondie's Bar In The Mission Is Endangered Too
There Was An Armed Assault In Blondie's Bar Bathroom Last Night