About this series: As you may have read recently, the city of Portland is at a “crossroads.” One path leads to a “yuppie playground,” where everyone lives in a condo and considers kayaking a fun leisure activity. Down the other lies the Socialist Revolution liberal newspaper editors secretly hope for. I mean dread. We dread that.
Anyway, in at least one respect, Portland is at an important intersection. City officials will soon consider zoning changes aimed at keeping bars out of residential areas. The direction the city takes from here will have a profound effect on our cultural and social lives for years to come.
Are neighborhood bars a scourge that must be stamped out before good citizens who drink in the privacy of their own homes see their property values slip from quintuple to merely quadruple what they originally paid? Or are local pubs the key links that keep our community together and make the six months of frigid dusk at this latitude tolerable?
The Bollard is launching a special investigative series called Drinking at a Crossroads: Neighborhood Bar Tour 2005-2006. Our staff will travel — on foot or by designated driver — to neighborhood bars throughout the area and conduct in-depth research to help us answer these important questions, or at least better understand whatever the hell the regulars at these places are mumbling to themselves all day.
Ruski’s
212 Danforth St., Portland
774-7604
Ruski’s: Wooden treasure of the Forest City
Ruski’s is the best neighborhood bar in Portland, so it made sense to start The Bollard’s Neighborhood Bar Tour at this landmark West End tavern.
Ruski’s couldn’t be any closer to its Danforth Street neighbors — several live in the apartments above the bar. An enormous multi-unit stands inches from one wall, and there’s a housing complex directly across the street. This has been the case for decades, and the neighborhood has managed to survive and even thrive a little here and there. But how?
There’s been a neighborhood bar at the corner of Danforth and Clark streets for over a century. According to a short history printed on the back of the menu by recent owners Steve and Rose Harris, the West End was once “one of the most exclusive areas in the city,” but apparently West End aristocrats of the Gilded Age didn’t feel the need to exclude “beer parlors.” (The handwriting on relevant historical documents is sloppy and smudged, proof to some historians that these nobles even frequented such places.)
The pub has had a number of colorful names over past 100 years: The White Eagle, The Red Eye, and The Green and The Gold among them. It was Ruski’s Tavern when the Harrises took over in 1985, and it has remained Ruski’s since the Harris’ sold the business to a Ruski’s regular earlier this year. The fact the place isn’t called 212 Danforth Street now is a sign nothing’s changed for the worse.
The establishment has a lot going for it: great food, cheap drinks and a welcoming atmosphere. It’s open at 7 a.m. most mornings to serve beer, bloodies and breakfast to third-shifters and the shiftless, and it stays open until 1 a.m. every night (food, including breakfast, is served until about 11 p.m. nightly).
Ruski’s is made out of wood. The chairs, tables and bar: all wood. The walls are wood-paneled, as is the ceiling. You half expect your draft to be pumped from a wooden keg into a wooden mug. All this lumber gives the small dining-and-drinking area a comfortable, den-like feel. Beer company mirrors and bar memorabilia crowd the walls, and it seems there’s always some charity drive underway that involves hanging little paper hearts or stockings bearing the names of the tavern’s generous clientele.
There’s a well-used dartboard and three TVs that may or may not be on, game-depending. If the tubes are on, the sound is usually off, and the TVs are placed up in corners where they’re easy to ignore.
Ruski’s only drawback is the music situation. The bartenders play commercial radio over the house sound system (usually the Oldies or “adult contemporary” format), so patrons are subjected not only to all that tired, over-played crap from Motown, Billy Joel and Sting, but to the hyper-inane commercials and DJ jibber-jabber.
This is, of course, a great way to get people with musical taste to feed the jukebox, but no one should ever put money in the TouchTunes machine currently inside Ruski’s. This digital jukebox boasts it can play a “gazillion” songs. Its screen seems to give you the choice of playing any tune from an extensive selection of several hundred albums, and you believe it. This is the age of the iPod, when you can carry your entire CD collection in your shirt pocket. Being roughly the size of a toilet tank, the TouchTunes digital jukebox could conceivably offer access to the entire history of recorded music.
However, you soon discover there are only one or two cuts available from each album, and these are invariably the most overplayed of the lot. A handful of other songs from the same record can be heard — for an additional credit! It’s like you have to bribe some little electronic DJ to play a B-side! This scam should be shunned on principle.
On the up-side, the background music at Ruski’s is usually drowned out by the laughter and banter of its patrons. The scene at Ruski’s can be raucous, but it’s never rough.
This is a testament to the Harrises, who never tolerated badly behaved patrons at either of their establishments (they still own Rosie’s, an equally excellent bar and restaurant in the Old Port). Jerks got banned for life, or worse. Steve Harris told me years ago of handing one troublemaker a “triple-lifetime ban.” Asked by the offender what that meant, Harris said, “You’re banned, your kids are banned, and if your kids have kids, they’re banned, too.”
This zero-tolerance approach to bad drunks is a key reason Ruski’s has been a harmonious part of its neighborhood for so long. The Harrises resisted the financial temptation to keep serving jerks and held firm every time a banned patron stumbled back in. They hired staff with equally friendly but firm-handed people skills, and these days, though it’s rarely necessary, the place polices itself.
Cheers to Ruski’s. Here’s to the next 100 beers. I mean, years. One hundred years. OK, beers too.
— Chris Busby
Ruski’s is open Mon.-Sat. from 7 a.m. to 1 a.m., Sun. from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. Patrons under 21 must be accompanied by parent or guardian.
