Thee Parkside, San Francisco's Beloved Punk Bar, to Close After 26 Years

The graffiti inside Thee Parkside's patio says everything the regulars won't: "This will be condos you can't afford!" The slogan is also printed on T-shirts sold behind the bar, a wry epitaph for a little red building on the corner of 17th and Wisconsin Streets that has anchored Potrero Hill's punk underground for 26 years. An official closing date has not been set, but live music will continue through the end of March.

The property reportedly sold for $1.33 million last April, though details of the transaction have not been made public. What becomes of the site remains unconfirmed.

For Duff Ryan, the news lands like a gut punch. Ryan has been coming to Thee Parkside since the early 2000s, first to catch a punk show, then as a California College of the Arts student grabbing tater tots after class at the CCA campus just a few blocks away. More than a decade after graduating, he still stops by on any given day and finds someone to talk to. "So many years later it's been a central part of my life, my friend group, my family," he said.

That sense of belonging was palpable on a recent Saturday night when East Bay metalcore band The Tower the Fool played what its frontman called one of the last shows at the venue. "It's an honor to be playing here at Thee Parkside," he told the crowd. "It's going to be one of the last ones here. We used to come here all the time when we were young. Back in our punk days, saw Reagan Youth, Adolescents over here." When someone in the crowd shouted "Sneaking in underage!", the frontman laughed and confirmed it: "Yeah. Sneaking in underage. We were having a great time."

Thee Parkside's closure is one piece of a wider unraveling on Potrero Hill. Bottom of the Hill, a 35-year-old music venue on Missouri Street, has announced it will close at the end of 2026. California College of the Arts, which shaped the neighborhood's creative identity for decades, will shut its doors in 2027. Together, the losses represent the near-total dismantling of an arts corridor that gave the neighborhood much of its character.

Thee Parkside hosted punk, hardcore, and underground bands for a quarter century in a venue that looked exactly like what it was: a dive bar that didn't apologize for it. Graffiti covered the bathroom walls. Stickers blanketed the mirror. Bands played on a small stage while regulars argued, drank, and kept coming back. Whatever replaces it on the corner of 17th and Wisconsin will have a hard time filling that particular kind of silence.