Canvas Café Closing
.I learned tonight that the Canvas Café and Gallery will be closing on 1 May 2007. This doesn’t make me happy.
I play Magic: The Gathering there every Wednesday, and have done so for over three years. We have a well-established group, and regularly bring in about 20–30 people.
It’s going to be hassle, but I’m pretty sure we can find another place. We might lose some of the group along the way, but presumably we’ll also gain some. In any case, that’s not really too bad, assuming of course that we can find another location in San Francisco to do it.
No, the real shame is that Canvas is closing. It’s a great place to just hang out, and I liked it before I ever played MTG there. They do good things there, including the open mike night on Wednesdays that all of us MTG players complain about, and many other events like it. In addition, they are a great showcase for local art. Then there’s the fact that they open pretty late, and that Canvas appears to be a good hangout for college students. And they’re a bar, which gives it a very different atmosphere from a restaurant, or even a cafe without alcohol.
The restaurant that’s replacing it will be none of those things, I suspect. It’s “Pacific Catch”, a local seafood chain. I don’t know much about it, it might be good, but I doubt it’ll have any of the things that make Canvas the unique spot that it is.
It always sucks when good things go away and are replaced by the humdrum. A change might end up being good for the group, maybe we can find a better location, but the loss of Canvas isn’t good for the neighborhood, or for the city.