Scoop: O-H?

1. SPEAK SOFTLY: The 1920s-era house once home to Schondecken coffee roasters in Westmoreland is undergoing renovation to become a 100-percent period-appropriate Prohibition speakeasy called the Bible Club. Ricardo Huelga, designer of Starlingear jewelry and a number of California bars and restaurants, spent years amassing period fixtures from the 1850s to 1920s—“right down to the picture frames and light switches and hinges and glasses,” he says—to make a Prohibition-era cocktail bar whose drinks will feature high-density ice hand-carved with a vintage chisel. Expect marble tabletops, a century-old bar top, no cellphones, no guns for mixers, and no sign whatsoever. A ship lantern will signal whether the bar’s open: Red means closed (or private), and green means come on in. “It takes kind of an obsessive, idiotic personality to do something like this,” says Huelga.

1. PORTLAND IS OVER: Well, it looks like the future of fallen bars is T-shirts. Doug Rogers, Slabtown’s last owner, has made one last run of T-shirts to memorialize the bar, with the old Johnny Thunders line, “You Can’t Put Yr Arms Around a Memory.” In December, Chopsticks owner David Chow told us for our “Closing Time” cover story that patrons were driving hours to buy T-shirts from the bar before it closed. Design company Sundholm is now making T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “Portland Is Over!” citing the passing of the Matador, Pal’s Shanty and other bars. And as for Magic Garden’s septuagenarian bartender, Patty Wright? According to a bartender on the strip bar’s final night, she has gotten a job working in the office at the company that made Magic Garden’s T-shirts.

1. COME AS YOU WERE: A rare audio recording of Nirvana playing at Satyricon has surfaced online. The band performed at the iconic Old Town punk club several times before achieving megastardom, but there’s one show in particular that stands out in local lore: a headlining gig Jan. 12, 1990, the night Cobain allegedly met Courtney Love. Twenty-five years later, YouTube user WY97212 uploaded the set to his video channel. “I was there,” he writes in the description. “I recorded their set. And I put it away in a box of tapes.” Beyond the Kurt-and-Courtney love connection, the recording is also notable for allegedly featuring the Melvins’ Dale Crover on drums before the group recruited its seventh and final drummer, Dave Grohl. 

1. WORD AWARDS: The finalists for the Oregon Book Awards were announced Monday on the Literary Arts website. Four of five fiction nominees are Portlanders—Smith Henderson, Lindsay Hill, Cari Luna and Amy Schutzer. The same is true for poetry, where Wendy Chin-Tanner, Emily Kendal Frey, Endi Bogue Hartigan and Zachary Schomburg were nominated.

WWeek 2015