Last Call, San Francisco

I’ve often felt I was born too late.

I didn’t come of age at The Farm, or The Mab,  and I missed Off Broadway and the Nightbreak by a few years. By the time I hit the scene there weren’t too many options left for a young punk rocker lookin for a wild time. It had already become a world of hand stamps and IDs, cover charges and agro doormen. Gone was the hint of danger, the controlled violence of a good mosh pit, gone was the urgency to hurry up and have the time of your life before the cops show up to shut the whole thing down.  Gone was the underground, the afterhours, the night…

But even in the absence of relevance there were those who played on. They came to the shores of Tire Beach with generators, they came to the corner of Mission and 20^th to play live in front of what once was Leed’s, and they came to Ace Junkyard, the last bastion of underground culture in San Francisco.

Located on McKinnon st. in the dirty depths of the Bayshore, Ace was a legitimate junkyard by day. A place where you could find a replacement alternator or a motor for the robot you were building in the garage, a place where the air was heavy with the smell of rust and rotten gasoline, and black grease was thickly caked on every hand you shook.  What set it apart from the area’s other dismantlers was the owner, a man named Bill. (Or, on occasion, a woman named Billenda.) It was his generosity and support of the local art and music scene that made the place what it was, but it was his soul that gave the place a life of its own.

Image by Scott Beale

If you’ve been lucky enough to have watched Cookie Mongoloid from atop a pile of scrap, or brave enough to have ridden one of the bike rodeo’s homemade thrill rides, or been fortunate enough to get to know Bill, you understand.  Ace was more than a place to see a show, or find a spare part. Ace was, to me, more than the sum of its parts. It was a place where I felt I belonged.

And now it’s gone.

After 25 years of operation, and a year long struggle with the landlady, Bill has been forced to close the gates of Ace for the last time, and so the unstoppable force of progress reduces to memory yet another sacred somewhere.

I raise glass to you Bill, and thank you with all my heart for the many ways Ace touched my life.

The spirit lives on in all of us.

This entry was posted on October 11, 2009 at 12:50 pm and is filed under Grand Opening/Closing, nightlife, San Francisco, Special Places with tags Ace Junkyard, bayshore, bike rodeo, bill, cookie mongoloid, cyclecide. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.