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118 NE 28th Ave., 503-235-2794, beulahlandpdx.com. 4-7 pm daily.
Established: January 1997
Beulahland is the first bar in Portland in which I felt truly welcome whether drunk in a crowd, alone with a book or in a quiet daytime corner meeting an old friend—a status it now retains for multiple generations of Portlanders. A neighborhood punk-rock bar at the edge of Laurlehurst obsessed with both beer and soccer, Beulahland is located near the exact geographic center of Portland and seemingly also its cultural one.
For happy hour, the bar currently offers what may be the cheapest drink in Portland to call itself a Manhattan—it's $4, served up alongside a $4 martini, a $4 kamikaze, and other $4 rotators that might include housemade ginger soda and a host of muddled limes. If you think that's a fancy way of saying they don't upcharge their $4 happy-hour wells to make fancy-sounding shit out of them, well, you're absolutely right. But it's downright neighborly of them not to—especially when you can also get a half-dozen happy-hour bar wings for $6. But Beulahland is a neighborly bar, with the city's first novelty Vend-o-Rama vending machine, afternoons that are quiet and DJ nights that are unbelievably loud, and a rear patio with a permanent bicycle installation.
Bar story: Beulahland used to be a magnet for Sharps—the anti-racist but sometimes violent skinheads Portland used to be chockablock with. Then Beulah removed the pool table, and the Sharps mostly moved next door to Chin Yen. After Chin Yen closed, nobody knows where they all went: They're punching Nazis in heaven, perhaps.
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