By Dick Cantwell

The Neighborhood Tap -- Phoenix or Dodo?

There's a strange transformation taking place across the northwestern landscape, and particularly in Seattle. Change is occurring, slowly but inexorably, almost like the creepy, socialistic replacement that those pod-things wrought in "Invasion of the Bodysnatchers," only this time it has more to do with the assertion of individual rights than their suppression. Down-at-heel taverns and roadhouses are converting from industrial beer- and urine-soaked dives to 20-tap alehouses with modern plumbing, decent food and the kind of atmosphere in which you'd feel reasonably comfortable. Hard as it is to believe that any wholesale change could be for the better, even wary dabblers are being brought over in droves to the phenomenon of the neighborhood alehouse.

Usually the new owners will overhaul the old joints, bashing down yellowed walls and chucking out malodorous naugahyde, coming in with glassy-smooth wood and tasteful fabrics, etched mirrors and artfully painted storefronts; but often the change is less perceptible, and can be outwardly marked mainly by the sudden appearance of a half-dozen or so microbrew neons. Where once blazed the Silver Bullet and the Schlitz Malt Liquor bull, passersby are now exhorted to come in and be given Hale's, Rogue, Redhook or Pike Place. In some cases, in fact, the changeover has been so sudden and unobtrusive that old customers are not quite shaken loose, and remain with the newer arrivals to nurse their Rainiers amid a barful of vari-colored pints and schooners.

People often ask why Seattle? Why Portland? Why the Northwest? One reason is easy: the licensing system here encourages taverns, where only beer and wine are served, and frowns on hard liquor joints that aren't restaurants. Many states have had to reinvent the alehouse, or work the idea of micros into a pervasive liquor culture; many states, we knowingly shudder, haven't gotten around to legalizing microbreweries at all. Here in the Northwest a system of marketing was built right into the movement. All it took was for a handful of beer-loving entrepreneurs to target some of these plywood-fronted watering holes for conversion, and the dominoes began to fall.

Which brings us to a somewhat sore point: where do those old guys go whose dingy neighborhood tavern has been converted in an uneasy three months' time to a non-smoking neighborhood alehouse? What's a working-class man or woman to do, fresh off the site, or crew, when the place that served buck-fifty pints in frosted glasses and threw in free pool on Sundays is asking better than three bills for a microbrew and offering stuff like roasted hazelnuts as bar snacks? Well, in many cases, I guess, they move on, scuttling up the avenue to some rathole with structural problems so severe that it wouldn't ever tempt the kind of money behind the places we're talking about. Progress generally has its price, and I suppose this is it, but wholesale displacement of even temporary populations always makes me a bit nervous.

So where are we headed? How complete will this changeover be? Is the neighborhood dive to become an endangered species, the smell of urinal cakes and generic cigarettes to be replaced by the aroma of pesto bread and focaccia-of-the-day? Nostalgically, one hopes not entirely. There are times when borderline noxious surroundings and a tepid can of Milwaukee's Best answer a basic need. But isn't it great that the day has arrived, up here anyway, that one doesn't have to drive for an hour to get to a place that serves beer with any flavor?

Of course this secret won't keep. The trucks are headed out your way, if they haven't already arrived. Those of us with friends and relatives in other corners of the country have mailed those clandestine packages and begun our proselytizing. We who are already converted can only hope that many more will join us, that increasing numbers of habitues of the big breweries will nod off over bland schoonersful and wake up yearning for something better.