Dives disappear in an apple martini world

In my mind, some landmarks are eternal and unchangeable -- the Washington Monument, the St. Louis arch, the Circle Bar on Main Street in Santa Monica. So it is difficult to explain the disassociation I felt when, deciding to just stick my head into an old haunt, I discovered the Circle was closed. Not closed down -- there was that familiar yellow sign and what looked like a new paint job -- just closed. At 11:30 in the morning.

I called my husband. “Didn’t the Circle used to be open in the morning?”

“Well, yeah,” he said. He himself had been known to take the Sunday newspaper and grab a seat as early as 9:30, stay all day watching football.

But those days are gone, and not just for my husband. Unbelievably, the Circle doesn’t open until 8:45 at night. Unbelievably, the Circle now has a bouncer, a red velvet rope and, on many nights, a line around the block. It has a clean floor and lots of red lights and candles. It has things like Midori and flavored vodka behind the bar. It has a Web site.

When I was still going to bars, there was never a line at the Circle, unless you counted the one to the bathroom. There was no red velvet rope, but by evening, you could smell the place a block away -- a fume of beer and smoke and sweat and pink disinfectant covering all sorts of bad behavior.

Back when I was going to bars, there was only one reason to go to the Circle: to drink. And smoke. (That’s how long it’s been since I’ve anchored a stool.) It was nothing like nearby bars -- Tavern on Main, the Firehouse. You did not go to the Circle for the calamari; you did not go to the Circle for brunch. You certainly did not go to the Circle to meet a potential date.

No, you went to the Circle to maybe shoot a game of pool and to drink, and to be around other people who were doing the same. And you drank sensible things -- beer, scotch, bourbon, tequila, maybe a gin and tonic. You did not order things like green apple martinis or Cosmopolitans; it was embarrassing enough if you asked for something on the rocks.

“It’s been about 2 1/2, three years,” says Circle bartender Regina McMahon, “but we still have people walking in and saying, ‘What happened?’ ”

It’s Thursday night and, as if on cue, a gentleman claims a stool, orders a beer and does just that. His name is Jim and he lived in Santa Monica from the early ‘80s to 1997; he’s just moved back, in fact.

“Man,” he says. “We used to get kicked out of here for puking on the floor. There was this tiny old lady who sat in the back telling everyone she was one of the Little Rascals, trying to get them to buy her drinks. There was this big biker named Kirk who dated this woman with no thumbs.” He takes a sip of his beer and his forearms settle onto the bar like two tired dogs come home again. “Now look at it,” he says.

There’s a trio of lovely young women across the way, several clusters of handsome young men. According to McMahon, the place doesn’t start rocking until 10, 10:30. Everyone’s drinking fancy cocktails, many with ice, a few with straws. The air, which is, of course, smoke free, smells of really good hair products and a little bit of stale beer.

“If you think this place has changed,” McMahon says, “you should check out the Brig.”

The Brig has been on Abbott Kinney since the invention of hops; compared to the Brig, the Circle was ritzy. Now, although the iconic sign depicting previous owner Babe Brandelli in his early boxing days still hangs over the door, the Brig is so sleek-chic it was featured in a beer commercial during the Super Bowl.

“I remember riding my bike past the Brig and hearing language that would make a sailor blush,” says Frank Mulvey, author of “The 101 Best Bars in Los Angeles.” The Brig and the Circle are prominently mentioned in his book -- in their previous incarnations.

“I like the funkiness of the old bars,” he says. “The new places with their velvet ropes have a sameness to them. But all the dives are disappearing.”

And not just the dives, but some of the venerable bar-restaurants. The Arsenal over on Pico Boulevard went upscale recently, and Bob Burns a few miles north is now a Houston’s. Both once catered to the prime-rib and double-scotch set, folks of an age way over the hip demographic of Houston’s.

Part of the change simply reflects shifts in the neighborhood. The Brig and the Circle were bastions of a younger, grubbier Venice -- never mind that the Circle has always technically been in Santa Monica. Their ambience and clientele were shaped by bikers, hippies, druggies, surfers and blue-collar holdouts back when such folks could still afford the rent.

But times have changed. Twelve years ago, when the pricey-hip Hal’s opened on Abbott Kinney Boulevard, it was a fish out of water; now the whole street looks like Larchmont Avenue. More and more, Santa Monica and Venice, once mutually disdainful, have blurred together to create one big apple-martini-drinking beach community.

The city’s relationship with the bar itself has also changed. L.A. has never been considered a drinking town in the New York and Chicago tradition -- in the cultural imagination, we’re more opium eaters than inebriates. This isn’t true, of course -- just consult Charles Bukowski’s “Barfly.”

But just as neighborhood cafes are giving way to Starbucks, the old bars are being snapped up by entrepreneurs and scene-makers. “The bar used to be a meeting place,” says Mulvey. “Now it’s a meat market. They’re all designed to pack in a huge number of twenty- and thirtysomethings.”

In L.A., he says, the licensing laws make it almost impossible to open a new bar, so scenesters are willing to pay a lot for an old one. It’s too expensive to keep staff around all day for a handful of hard-drinking customers, so they add a menu or turn it into a sports bar. Or limit the hours and throw down the red velvet gauntlet -- in this town, there’s nothing like implying exclusivity to draw a crowd. The new smoking laws have changed the atmosphere as well, literally and figuratively.

“The days of the two-fisted drinking establishments are over,” he says.

Not everyone would consider this a bad thing, especially in a town where recovery facilities may well outnumber the bars. But the absence of a bar is not going to keep a drinker from drinking and if that’s flavored vodka in the glasses at the Circle, well, it’s still vodka.