- 0 1 0 1 0 - IN THE JUNGLE: Welcome to the Weirdest. Lounge. Ever. Posted - 9/1/03 5:38 PM PST - 0 1 0 1 0 - Somewhere in Estacada, Oregon there is a restaurant where you can drink gin with lions and bears. A place where you can line dance under a lion with snarling jaws. This place is called the Jen Jen Safari Club and it's easily the strangest place anywhere near Portland to "get your drink on." - 0 1 0 1 0 - I first heard about the Safari Club in 1996. A friend, on his way somewhere else, spotted the restaurant and vowed to return one day to explore its insides. His epic description of the exterior stuck in my mind. The Safari Club was a block long and looked like a gigantic hut. The structure belonged on Skull Island, not in downtown Estacada, a town known as the Christmas Tree Capitol of the World. A display window near the front doors housed two lions, sans Santa hats, madly mangling each other. Overhead, a sign proudly proclaimed "lounge" next to a cartoon of a tiger. Whatever lied within those doors, it incorporated dead animals, pseudo-African architecture and alcohol. In short, the Safari Club sounded like the greatest business venture ever conceived by a human mind. He has yet to make the journey and neither had I, until a recent article appeared in Willamette Week. The Safari Club is on its last legs due to declining patronage. And the roof is collapsing. Literally. Awwwwwww! They're so cute! The article neglected to mention when exactly it was closing so I moved fast. I pulled up Map Quest and typed in the restaurant's address. As usual, the website coughed-up a list of directions that looked like something out of a Martian trigonometry text book. Among the 22 steps was "Turn SLIGHT LEFT onto OR-224/ CLACKAMAS HWY/ SE MILWAUKIE EXWY. Continue to follow OR-224." Slight left? OR-224? Following Map Quest's "easy driving directions" would inevitably land me in Medford. I went back to the Willamette Weeks article. "Head way out Foster Road and you'll find yourself in Estacada." I decided to take my chances with the later. - 0 1 0 1 0 - I headed over the Sellwood Bridge and hit Foster Road, a stretch of asphalt where good things come to die. The street is a graveyard for the fading echoes of Portland's past. Worn-out houses and tired taverns line both sides of Foster. Iconic businesses slowly rot. The fading embers of Tom Peterson's furniture store rests at the edges of one intersection. As I passed, an elderly barber was giving someone an haircut underneath a neon bust of a smiling man with military-style hair. In its glory days, Peterson's stores were a haven for these sort of tie-ins. Every Sunday for decades, the business offered "Official Tom Peterson haircuts" with any purchase along with additional free gifts. I still have a Peterson alarm clock that chimes "Wake up to a happy day." At the height of his glory, there was even a trolley that would cart customers between his Eastside and Westside locations. Throughout the '70s and '80s, Tom Peterson was a Portland kingpin, endlessly rolling out unbelievable deals on furniture sets along with odd promotions. Sadly, in the early '90s Peterson invested heavily in a local stereo chain and his empire melted into one last store in the outer reaches of Foster Road. Tom Peterson (and Gloria's Too!) commercials still rule late night television in Portland but the furniture baron’s days are sadly numbered. Rolling through that graveyard of commerce, random quotes from Stand By Me jumped into my head. "We're going to see a dead body. Maybe it shouldn't be a party." I was going in search of a different kind of corpse: the sort that are torn apart by tractors and aren't mourned with headstones. I wasn't going in search of a kitschy bar full of dead animals, I was searching for the American Dream, dammit, the very essence of what once drove this country, what once made it great, that which... ...OK, fine, I was looking for a kitschy bar. Sheesh. - 0 1 0 1 0 - Further along Foster, the graffiti-soaked Jack in the Boxes and Russian taverns give way to farms and winding rural pavement. The road may actually go on forever. After an hour, I turned off Foster and into downtown Estacada. The place looks like Small Town USA; straight out of Little Rock in the aforementioned Rob Reiner movie. Family-owned drug stores still thrive. Wooden water tanks sit on stilts. Greasy punks in speeding Buicks slap mailboxes with baseball bats 24-hours a day. And there, like a beacon over the town's firehouse was a sign for Jen Jen's Safari Club. "Welcome to the Safari Club, where you don't eat the food, the food eats you. Come on, can we get a rimshot, folks?" It was like I imagined. The building is huge and plastic blue thatch hung down from the roof. A tiger lingers on the sign and lions fought in the display window. Clay stucco stretches down the street to the corner. Inside, I was hit by a blast of smoke and grease. The Safari Club smells like any ancient coffee shop. The interior is soaked in the scent of 30 years of constantly frying food and endlessly burning cigarettes. Its walls look like they've been blasted with 400,000 Pall Malls. Run a finger along the woodwork, you may be able to write your name. The Safari Club is the sort of place where you can literally smell the history. Near the entrance, two gigantic polar bears greet visitors. Each stands on its hind legs and is well over ten feet tall. If Arvydas Sabonis was reborn as twin polar bears that were hit with gamma rays, this what he/they might look like. The bear's paws are raised but they're each in mid-roar with bared fangs. It's hard to tell if they want to waive hello or tear the throats out of anyone that heads for the lounge. - 0 1 0 1 0 - To the left of the bears lies a plaque which offers a history of the restaurant. "The Safari Club was designed and constructed by Jorgans Construction Company in 1970. We hope that you enjoy your visit in this unique club and further hope that you, your family and friends return time and time again. This is the only one of its type in the world today. It is owned by Park Enterprises and is managed by Mike Park. This collection of outstanding trophies in this club was taken on 23 different hunting expeditions to six different countries through the world over a period of six years. The majority of trophies taken by world-renowned big game hunter Glen Park have now been entered in the World Record Books. Glen Park is the most active and outstanding hunter in the United States today. It was Glen Park's idea to share these outstanding, beautiful trophies with the local citizenry by building a unique safari club." - 0 1 0 1 0 - The smiling bears serve as a sort of crossroads. To the right lies a coffee shop. To the left is the lounge. I gravitated towards the booze. The lounge area encompasses most of the building. It looks like your average '60s watering hole running on fumes. The bar itself is exotic, surrounded by elaborate yarn light fixtures. Wooden paneling cover many of the walls. Because it was a Sunday afternoon, the place was mostly vacant. A cowgirl was playing solitary pool in the corner. Two people sitting a table occasionally turned from a quiet conversation to scream Vietnamese at someone in the kitchen. No one was working the long, red bar. Maybe Estacada has some sort of archaic "no alcohol on Sundays" policy. Eat your heart out, Chuck E. Cheese Display cases, much like the ones you would see in a museum, line the walls. In one near the bar, two tigers ferociously pummel each other like fur-covered linebackers. In another, a line of beers nibble on a fallen deer. Gazelles flee from predators in a dusty African diorama. Animal busts cover every inch of left-over plaster. Locals call the club the "dead zoo" for a reason. The plaque is right, there's no other place like this on earth. In a tiny, glass case near the pool tables lies a large grizzly bear. Its head is lowered and the fur on its shoulders is faded. The bear looks like a shell shocked war vet. Once upon a time, Lynyrd Skynyrd cover bands played in the lounge every Saturday night, drawing huge crowds. Maybe that explains it. This very well could be the strangest business on the west coast. The Safari Club belongs in a Paul Verhoven adaptation of "Bungalow Bill." These display cases aren't the sort found in your local neighborhood museum. These animals don't stare blankly at the smeared glass seperating them from the public, they're blood-thirsty maniacs. Deer scream in terror. Cougars act like, well, cougars. The lounge is a frozen blood orgy behind glass. A crowded weekend night at the Safari Club is probably the most surreal place on Earth. Over the dance floor, a lion is frozen in mid pounce. Alongside him, a line of cheetahs fire themselves at a series of empty tables. How do people react to that sort of thing? "Hey, look at that. We're line dancing under a blood-thirsty lion that wants to tear our limbs off. Yee haw!" The lion seems like an open invitation for drunken shenanigans. How many patrons have poured beer down its jaws or attempted to tear him off the ceiling for a slow dance? A guess: 10,515 for both. - 0 1 0 1 0 - The coffee shop is more traditional. Paintings of trains line the walls. A fish tank sits at the end of the counter. Sometime ago, the Safari Club was sold and the diner portion was turned into a Chinese restaurant. The menu and a small Buddhist shrine clash with the deer heads and brown vinyl booths. I ordered a tea and the waitress returned with a pot full of what tasted like Folgers Crystals. The water had been boiled in the coffee machine. She apologized profusely. I couldn't help but notice that the place was deserted. If this doesn't wet your appetite, nothing will. Time for some Chinese food. Timber folk passed by the window, none of them looking in. Tourists embarking on a white water rafting adventure were oblivious. In most cities, a Chinese restaurant and a lounge full of dead animals would either be a rousing success or eventually burned to the ground by mad mobs, regardless of bad food. Apparently, Estacada isn't one of them. As I stuck a fork in a plate of cold chow mien, two teenagers paced impatiently across the street. After a few minutes, a guy, who may as well have been a Kid Rock impersonator, wandered up. They headed for a nearby alley. Maybe they missed the "drug free zone" signs posted at the end of every block. - 0 1 0 1 0 - I've heard old stories about people making the hour long trek from Portland for a Saturday night at the club. That era is long gone. The stage in the lounge looked like it hadn't been touched in years. The club's final day hasn't been set but it's probably soon. A place like the Safari Club is probably too weird to exist in the modern world. Maybe it's amazing that the place is still operating. In a larger city, it would probably draw a round-the-clock sidewalk protest from PETA. Regardless, the club, despite up and downs, could survive the tests of time. Various generations of hipster 20-somethings would adopt it and discard it, making way for the next wave behind them to "discover" the club all over again. Smokey says: "Forget forest fires, only you can get me out of this thing!" Still, kitsch appeal hasn't saved similar Portland metro business like the Carnival/Carousel Restaurant and Jazz De Opus. What kills operations like the Safari Club? Is it changing tastes? Mismanagement? Disrepair? In the case of the Safari Club, it's a combination of all three. There's also the Olive Garden factor to consider. Take a look at your favorite commercial district. Compare it to what it looked like ten, even five years ago. There's probably a 50% in the presence of signs belonging to a franchise. If familiarity breeds contempt, it also contributes to the high success-rate of corporate-owned stand-bys like Starbucks and Best Buy. Maybe Chili's, Applebee's and the like further contributed to the downward spiral of the Safari Club. Personally, I blame the decline of moral values in this country. It's usually to blame for this sort of thing. And the internet. Stupid morals. Lousy internet. UPDATE (September, 2005): The Safari Club apparently survived whatever financial storm it was facing back in the summer of 2003 when I originally wrote this article. Not only did it overcome its hurdles, it's been discovered by the local alterna-press and it seems like every few months a mention of the lounge pops up somewhere in the land of PDX media. The last time I visited would have been back in the winter of 2004 and the place hadn't changed much. The outside was still worn-down and the animals were looking pretty raged. Still, the Safari Club is finally earning itself some much needed respect and hopefully will one day become as beloved as the closer-to-Portland Alibi Tiki Lounge, another ancient relic from the bygone cocktail era. Here's hoping it will live long and prosper well into the 22nd century. Next time: Who needs Burning Man when the Alvord Desert is right next door? Previous -->