Esquire magazine placed the Mermaid on its list of America’s best bars - though some locals think the publication mistakenly dropped the word “dive” - noting “septuagenarian bartenders still refuse to make drinks they don’t like.”ĭiana Albergate, Thelen’s stepdaughter, who manages his property, said a website recently called and said she should look up its review of the Mermaid. The Mermaid is so adamantly un-hip that it has become hip. “We used to go to our neighbors’ parties rather than call the police on our neighbors,” Reviczky said. The Mermaid, Scotty’s and Sea Sprite speak to a previous era in Hermosa Beach and the freewheeling people who lived there. ![]() “Just the thought of putting a corporate hotel and restaurant there turns my stomach,” said former Mayor Sam Edgerton, who uses a Mermaid bar stool as the captain’s chair on his 42-foot yacht. All the action on the Strand, people skating, walking, running, biking.”īut not everyone favors change. “It’s a quintessential Southern California beach scene. “Great properties like that don’t come along very often,” said Chop Keenan, the Beach House owner, who tried to buy Thelen’s property. Thelen, who was shot down over the Mediterranean during World War II, did business with a handshake, and his tenants seldom had leases.Ī sale would mean not only goodbye to the Mermaid, but to the other establishments on Thelen’s property, such as the Poopdeck, a beer bar whose owner of 35 years recently died Good Stuff restaurant, which has been serving patrons for almost 29 years and Cantina Real, a fixture for 46 years. Although Thelen spent much of the 53 years he owned the Mermaid sitting at the corner stool at the bar or in the parking lot finishing a crossword puzzle, he accumulated a fortune in South Bay real estate. Over time, the Mermaid became the gathering spot for anybody who was anybody in town. It holds the ashes of one Thomas Marshall, who died in January 1932 of heart disease, according to the label, and patrons sometimes will have a drink with him. Now and then a bartender will pull out the tin box a woman left one night. “Every seat in here has a ghost in it,” said Mermaid bartender Mike Jones, who has worked there 26 years. A painting of Thelen in dark-rimmed glasses and a coat and tie sits above the pay phone. ![]() The Strand properties have had personality to spare.Īt the Mermaid, with its black Naugahyde booths, paneled walls and stained dark red rug, large windows open to the beach. “I think it will change the personality of the city.” “Those are not the dollar-a-beer crowd that some of those establishments down there attract now,” Mayor J.R. Almost any change in ownership would transform Hermosa Beach, trading the quirky for the swanky.
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