Amado’s bar in san francisco, california.
Amado’s bar. Photo by Annika Hom, taken Nov. 29, 2023.

The bar and live entertainment venue Amado’s underwent many Biblical-sounding catastrophes: A plague. A flood. But owner David Quinby said after eight years, it has finally come to an end for a more pedestrian reason: Dwindling sales.

Amado’s, the bar and underground-music venue at 998 Valencia St. near 21st Street, confirmed its closure Wednesday, due to financial losses spurred by a myriad of factors.

While its owner blamed the controversial Valencia center bike lane, it’s likely that the estimated costs of renovating after a flood and the loss of revenue from an entertainment space that could no longer be used were major factors.

“Unfortunately, it closed last week because of the bike lane,” Quinby said, though Mission Local could not immediately determine the bike lane’s effect.

Quinby pointed to demands from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency that he close his Valencia Street parklet. But the city does not allow parklets within 20 feet of an intersection, and Amado’s is located on a corner.

General removal of parking from the bike lane, he said, brought his sales down to 80 percent of what it was before the lane was there. There was no independent way of verifying this figure, however, and there is a public parking garage nearby.

Vans loading music equipment would get ticketed or towed, deterring customers from coming, Quinby said, who added that, while he was a cyclist himself, he did not support the center bike lane on the corridor. 

But the venue also suffered a big blow when a flood destroyed the basement venue on Pride Weekend, leading to canceled shows and damage to the piano, lighting system, stairs and bar. 

The initial renovation cost about $500,000 — on top of kitchen renovation costs already underway. Closing the basement meant revenue was “cut in half,” an Amado’s Instagram post said.

“This could not have happened at a worse time,” a July 18 Instagram post from the bar read. “We are faced with some very tough decisions.” 

Of its $50,000 GoFundMe ask, the bar has raised just over $26,500 in donations to date.

The Covid-19 pandemic hurt the business, too, though Amado’s stayed open throughout. 

Quinby named the bar after Amado Espinoza, a musician and a storied local bartender at the former Cava 22, and a dear friend of Quinby. Customers could expect to find a wide variety of music each day of the week, from Balkan to bolero. Throughout the years the bar hosted revered Mission community events including readings at Litquake, and live music at Porchfest. 

“I mean, for us, we’re heartbroken. It’s been a great community partner for the past eight and a half years,” said Kevin Ortiz, the president of the San Francisco Latinx Democratic Club.

The space was previously a retail shop. In 2015, Quinby took over. He had revered the spot since 1982, when the Bay Area native saw one of his first concerts, by a punk group called “The Offensive.”

But now, it’s time to take a bow. “Amado’s is gone. It’s gone,” Quinby said. “Nobody can get to the place. It’s really sad.”

This article has been updated to include information about San Francisco’s requirements for parklets.

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REPORTER. Annika Hom is our inequality reporter through our partnership with Report for America. Annika was born and raised in the Bay Area. She previously interned at SF Weekly and the Boston Globe where she focused on local news and immigration. She is a proud Chinese and Filipina American. She has a twin brother that (contrary to soap opera tropes) is not evil.

Follow her on Twitter at @AnnikaHom.

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21 Comments

  1. Given the uniform Valencia merchants’ unhappiness with the bike lane, I guess their complaints have to be taken seriously. But I’ve heard (don’t know for sure) that the lane eliminated only 17 parking spaces, on the entire street. How does that kill business? Yes, the existence of only one lane makes deliveries much harder, but how does that keep customers away?

    One of the vocal haters of the lane is Tacolicious. What keeps me away from there as a customer is $7.50 tacos, not the bike lane. I have gone from maybe once or twice a month there to . . . never.

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  2. When your destination is other than Valencia Street – riding down the center bike lane feels like royalty. All this at the expense of Valencia Street losing a sense of place and destination. The aesthetics are jarring. SFMTA’s single minded drive for accentuated bike and bus lanes might be great for keeping things moving. Problem being, this evaporates places to want to go to.

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    1. Could you elaborate on how the position of a bike lane makes Valencia “lose it’s sense of place and destination”?

      If the average small business owner is to be believed, none of those cyclists were customers anyways. 😉

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      1. This should be obvious for anyone with half a brain. Places attract people to gather, becoming a destination if they are enough of a draw. The bike lane cuts right through the middle – it separates and excludes, in a rather domineering way. And, of course: just. look. at. it. As far as train-wrecks-you-can’t-take-your-eyes-of is concerned – I put it up there with these humongous grills that BMW put on their vehicles these days.

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        1. Bicycle advocates generally preferred a parking-protected approach that would put the lane to the right of parked cars, by the curb, like we have further north on Valencia. Unfortunately, the same business owners complained just as loudly about that when it was proposed, as they’ve complained about any sort of safer bike infrastructure whatsoever.

          A lot of San Franciscans don’t drive, and these businesses are going to have to accept some sort of compromise here to reduce traffic deaths.

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          1. Storefront businesses have been squeezed for years now, pandemic or no. Frivolous ADA lawsuits, Healthy SF, lactation, Yelp extortion, Doordash, illegal street vending and fent/meth squalor that the City lets slide. That’s what comes to mind straight without introspection. It’s a death by a thousand cuts, that’s how we arrive at $7.50 tacos in places where the family isn’t volunteered to work for free. How bad can a compromise be for the next thing that’s getting layered on top, squeezing customers too? (Rhetorical question). And sure, I give everybody how Valencia is full of suburbanites who are too timid to go to a taqueria proper, but still want to brag back home how they dared the Mission. If this is what keeps Valencia Street from being a boarded up transportation facility, fine by me. /rant

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  3. I’m sorry to see Amado’s close, but I call BS on the owner.

    1. If you are a BAR, selling ALCOHOL, and you think your business has slowed because your customers can’t park their CARS in front of your establishment, perhaps you need to reconsider your industry. You’re on Valencia, near a parking garage, a bike share station, two BART stations, and multiple bus lines.

    2. Amado’s took down their parklet on Valencia. They have so far not removed, or even *used*, the parklet they built on 21st. That eyesore has been gathering trash and graffiti and no activity since the pandemic. I live on 21st and walk by it multiple times a day, and I have never seen it used. If it wasn’t going to be used for customers, it could have become a loading zone for the business. (Then maybe your vans unloading music equipment wouldn’t have been ticketed. I would like to see documentation for the towing; unless a vehicle breaks down, has a boot, or blocks a driveway, they don’t tow.) It could have been a pickup/drop off zone so your customers could arrive and depart safely from, I’m going to say it again, a BAR. Or the neighbors could park there like they used to do.

    But I guess it’s easier to whine about a bike lane.

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  4. I have mixed feelings about the center bike lane, but Amado’s was struggling to get people in the door long before it was put in. I can’t recall a time when they were thriving; the old antique/collectibles shop in that space got far more foot traffic (though it doesn’t seem like that converted to sales)

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  5. “Nobody can get to the place”? Senor Sisig two doors down and Lolo further down the block are both packed every time I walk by, which is almost every night. People can still get to the places they want to go to, this guy just has an axe to grind about the bike lane.

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  6. Attempting to drive a car down Valencia has been made worse in many ways because of the dreaded idiotic bike lane,…which is bordered by a single slow moving car lane on each side. And guess what? If there is a line of bumper to bumper traffic you can additionally suffer the traffic lights that turn red after maybe two or three cars can clean an intersection. Unbelievable. A must to avoid.

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    1. The actual space for traffic was hardly reduced. It was one driving lane before the change, drivers can’t just double park in the bike lane anymore.

      I don’t know SFMTAs intentions but I would consider this deterrence of driving on Valencia a positive outcome. There are better through-streets a block away. Why on earth anyone would drive on Valencia unless absolutely necessary (before or after the change) is beyond me.

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  7. If the bar owner is correct that his alcohol sales are down by 20% due to drivers not being able to park and imbibe, then this is a good thing for San Francisco. As the author points out, there are a lot of factors not accounted for here. I’m not a fan of the dangerous center-running design, but we need to support reliable bike infrastructure in the city–especially protecting against drunk drivers killing cyclists.

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  8. Really, they were open “throughout” 2020?! Didn’t all bars and venues have to close for a time?

    And what caused the flood?

    That place used to be Viracocha, a surreal, gorgeous speakeasy with unforgettable events practically every night. I hope a new owner can revive some of the old spirit.

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  9. Parklets on corners all over the city were eliminated when the Parklet guidelines were revised; it wasn’t due to the redesign of Valencia. People were getting mowed down by drivers and the City was trying to reduce that.

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  10. “Vans loading music equipment would get ticketed or towed, deterring customers from coming, ”

    The musicians had more trouble parking, therefore the customers went away? That doesn’t even make any sense.

    There are probably better ways to put down the bike lane, but Valencia business owners whine about every single one of them. I wish they would stop lying about this “bike lanes ruined my otherwise FLAWLESS business plan!” nonsense and just admit they’re annoyed at having to personally spend a couple minutes more looking for a parking space when _they_ go to work.

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  11. The space was previously a retail shop AND music speakeasy called Viracocha. Before that it was a Santeria shop for many many years.

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  12. Wow, a lot of businesses are complaining about the bike lane. In fact, there’s an organized campaign of anti-bike lane posters in many Valencia business. Personally, I don’t think the bike lane is that critical in the neighborhood business decline, but I wonder if ML could ask the SFMTA to respond.

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  13. It is wrong to maximize Valencia’s street design for cyclists commuting through the MIssion’s neighborhood commercial district, because that produces distortions in many other considerations.

    SFMTA removed half of Mission Street’s transit stops to accommodate those commuting though the Mission even though BART high speed rail is always an option for those in a hurry.

    Mission residents and businesses don’t rank in SFMTA’s political calculus. And since there is no city money available for the Mission nonprofit racket in this, they can’t be bothered.

    Now SFMTA has dragged ass on the evaluation report for the death chute. Best to revert to the previous bike lane consideration, maybe biting the bullet on allowing app drivers to park in the median.

    The question is, how to we make this a teaching moment for the livability urbanists, that when they cry wolf about perceived risks and demand immediate action, they end up making matters worse not only for themselves, but for others?

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