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"Whooooooooa!" A dozen heads turn toward the
potbellied man in the white NASCAR hat and Jimmy Buffett tour T-shirt
standing in the doorway. "I like the light in here!" At last, they've
let the sunshine in at Sandy Hut (1430 NE Sandy Blvd., 235-7972),
and even the blue-collar regulars can't complain. In March, when the
owners of Club 21 took over the 92-year-old purple box a half-mile west,
Portland pre-emptively grumbled—never mind that there's little that
could've been done to ruin "Handy Slut" that it hadn't already done to
itself. It was a dark, charmless place, earning landmark status only
because it managed to go almost a century without getting bulldozed. A
bougie makeover, in this case, might've been an improvement. But what
Marcus Archambeault and Warren Boothby have done is less a full-scale
remodel than the sort of rearrangement a mother might give her son's
bedroom after he finally moves out: scrub the stink out of the carpets,
move some furniture around, and open a damn window. The integrity of
Sandy Hut, such as it was, has been maintained, except now that the
paint has been cleaned off the glass bricks at the rear end of the
building, you can actually see it: the vintage beer schwag; the Playboy
pinball machine; the pool table with lion heads carved into the
corners; the awesome Al Hirschfeld mural, now prominently displayed.
Once the sort of dive where Don Draper would go to drink himself to
death, it could now be his rec room. Not everything survived the
changeover. Shuffleboard is gone, and live music—which briefly
re-energized the bar toward the end of its previous iteration—doesn't
appear to be in the cards. Change isn't always seamless. But sometimes,
it's necessary. Whoa, indeed.
WWeek 2015