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Thrillist Nation
9 Bars With Weird Past Lives
Before they were trendy nightlife destinations, they were something else
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Alberta Substation
Location: Portland, OR
Alberta Substation's named after the Northwestern Electric Co., and has been restored to look the part thanks to old-school chandeliers, gigantic cathedral-style windows, power-station insulators on bare-brick walls, and a high-voltage rack, which is unfortunately an antique meter with all sorts of knobs, and not a Kelly LeBrock created by two of them.
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The Hudson
Location: Los Angeles, CA
The Hudson's a vintage-industrial barstaurant, with a massive, tree lined patio, dark wood booths, and a burgundy decor designed to make you feel like you're in a classic, pre-Prohibition Chicago-style establishment, all housed in what was formerly WeHo's first train station, with remnants of tracks outside to make you extra nostalgic for something you've never seen in LA.
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Museum Bar
Location: Atlanta, GA
Transmogrifying an 1800s-era church into a restaurant/ bar/ lounge, Museum's a 15000sqft, three-level, five-bar tabernacle of good times, with a gold-carpeted canopy entrance from RDA, 17 crystal chandeliers, black church pews, an underground area with Gothic lamps, a bed-furnished VIP zone, and a concert stage ringed by the building's original stone wall, who's apparently still too pissed at the Civil War's outcome to stay dead.
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Hope Garage
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Hope Garage's a "home comfort" resto from a team that's been involved in everything from Ed's Lobster Bar to Santos Party House. This time, they removed the owner's "fancy cars" ('57 Chevy!) from an actual garage, added a concrete bar and a glass-paneled roll-down door, and adorned the walls with a series of works by the street artist Mullet, even though you can party in the front here, too.
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Old Ship Saloon
Location: San Francisco, CA
Occupying one of the longest-running booze establishments in SF, OSS has been both a brothel, and a bar where "sleeping" sailors would wake up to find themselves shanghaied onto boats. Luckily, you'll only be forcefully pressured into drinking a makeshift crow's nest worth of booze, and eating truffle oil and Parmesan-coated steak fries.
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The Pine Box
Location: Seattle, WA
Opened in the old funeral home that used to house Chapel, this 120-seater's pouring the same number of beers Larry Bird probably drank with Wade Boggs every night after a victory (33) in a vaulted space decked w/ a U-shaped bar built using shelves that held ashes from the crematorium, and a poster in memory of Bruce Lee, whose funeral was held there in '73.
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Lowry Beer Garden
Location: Denver, CO
What with all the talk about drafts in the '70s, it's a wonder that beer wasn't flowing at the Lowry Air Force base decades ago. Finally righting that: the massive Lowry Beer Garden, which's outfitted the bones of the shuttered air base with 350 seats' worth of "Oktoberfest-style picnic tables", and a menu with 16 taps of mostly CO beers, even more bottles, and "creatively topped" gourmet sausages.
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The Crow Bar
Location: Austin, TX
Run by two longtime-friend veteran barkeeps bored with quick-pouring wells at live music venues, CB is a cocktail-slinging dive decked out with crow imagery, a copper-stained bartop, and pool tables, run out of an 85-year-old South Austin space that formerly housed a Mexican resto, gun range, church, and brothel, a transition that saw them go from Sister Acts to Making Whoopi.
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Bus Bar at Trusty's
Location: Washington, DC
Upstairs at Trusty's has been converted into a bus-themed booze cave, with a sunbathed outdoor deck and a main room with lunchbox-based overhead and Thermos-chandelier lighting atop a bar made of an actual school bus. The bar itself's stocked with 12 craft cans (including Butternuts standouts Pork Slap Ale and Heinniewisen Farmhouse Ale) -- so be sure to bring the kind of buddies who go round for round.
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