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The Whiteaker neighborhood bar and venue — a Eugene institution for three decades — closed this week, ahead of a sale of the building. More information on new ownership and exact plans is expected in the new year.
On the final evenings at Sam Bond’s Garage, things proceeded largely as they have at the Whiteaker neighborhood staple bar and music venue for the last 30 years.
Sunday, live spritely Irish music rang through the former garage space as busy bartenders took drink and food orders, and Buddy, the 14-year-old bar cat, watched over the proceedings. Monday, bingo night meant cries of victory and dejection with each called number.
If not for the Instagram post the bar and music venue had posted on Nov. 8, saying that Nov. 30 would be its last night open and the closing was “not a drill,” there was hardly any sign these were the final nights the business would be open. The actual last night at Sam Bond’s Garage was pushed one day, to Monday, Dec. 1, to allow for one final bingo night.
For the musicians who have played there, the locals who have popped in for a drink and a game of bingo, the last nights brought three decades of beloved neighborhood vibing to a close — for now.
“Businesses have a life cycle, and so do people,” said Mark Jaeger, one of the three co-owners of Sam Bond’s Garage. Jaeger said the building has not sold yet but is currently under contract to its likely new owners. “We’ve come to that point when it’s time to move on, and let somebody else carry the torch.”
‘The wave that was waiting’
The building was listed for sale this year in May, The Register-Guard reported, with the listing noting that its roughly $1 million asking price included the real estate, furniture, fixtures, equipment and business name.
That wasn’t the first time that Sam Bond’s Garage sounded the alarm for a closure. The May listing came months after a previous announcement in November 2024, that the bar and venue would close; a month after that announcement, though, the bar posted that it would in fact stay open.
The year delay in a sale meant that Sam Bond’s Garage reached its 30-year anniversary under the owners who reimagined it.
The building was built between 1918 and 1923 and is part of the Blair Boulevard Historic Commercial District’s entry on the National Register of Historic Places.
The building’s name comes from its origin as an automobile repair shop belonging to Sam Bond, a Eugene mechanic, Depression-era City Council member and civic leader, who ran the shop there until 1972. It was home to the headquarters for the environmental group Save Our ecoSystems before Jaeger, Bart Caridio and Todd Davis purchased the building and reimagined it as a brewpub and music venue in 1995.
Jaeger mentioned the musical acts that had played at Sam Bond’s, including Portland legend Elliott Smith, indie singer-songwriter Neko Case, folk singer Ramblin’ Jack Elliott. He remembered the more offbeat moments, like customers walking into the door looking shocked to discover mostly nude performance artists swinging from the rafters as the Jane’s Addiction song “Been Caught Stealing” played, and said the closing brought a mix of emotions.
Jaeger said he thinks he and his co-owners got lucky, opening the doors at the right time and place to both welcome “the wave that was waiting to come in,” of regional 1990s musicians and the cultural growth of the Whiteaker neighborhood. But 30 years since opening, times have changed.
“The three owners are getting older and putting in less energy to the business,” Jaeger, now 62, said. “Making a business like this work has gotten a lot more difficult post-COVID, with prices and changes and dining habits and going out. It just needs some fresh energy to keep it going.”
He said the silver lining to selling the bar is that the new owners intend to keep the building as a bar and venue space. More information on new ownership and exact plans is expected in the new year, Jaeger said.
One last bingo night
On Monday night, bingo hosts Tom Heinl and Chad Kushuba were joking about offloading bar ephemera as bingo prizes and last chances to win after 24 years of the game.
“I’m gonna miss this song,” Kushuba said between lyrics as he and Heinl led a singalong to a tribute song with the lyric: “Everybody is somebody at Sam Bond’s Garage.”
Lester Maurer, 40, has been going to Sam Bond’s since he moved to Eugene in 2009. He was the first winner on the last bingo night, taking home an unopened Sam Bond’s-branded “Crankshaft” IPA from 2016. He said winning on the last night of bingo felt, “oddly,” the same as it had for the last 16 years he’s been coming to Monday night bingo at the bar, except for one note.
“It’s the end of an era,” he said.
Jenelle Isaacson Etzel’s husband took home a tap shaped like a gear, a nod to the bar’s mechanic roots, and a weird puzzle Heinl found at a local Goodwill as bingo prizes.
Etzel took home one of the best prizes of the night, no bingo necessary: the stained glass art of a band playing music that she gave to the bar in the late ’90s.
At the time, she lived close to the bar and would work on her stained glass in her garage, where the Sam Bond’s crew first saw the piece.
The bar became a fixture of her life in Eugene after graduation, and was where she met the women who would become her bandmates in the punk band Spread Eagle.
Etzel, who now owns and operates a real estate company in Portland, wasn’t planning on heading down to Eugene for the final night. But on Sunday, Barb Barnard, a friend from her post-undergraduate life who is married to bar co-owner Todd Davis, texted pictures of Etzel on Sam Bond’s stage.
Etzel, who was 21 years old when she started frequenting Sam Bond’s and is now 49, said she’s not a nostalgic person, but coming to Eugene for the final night at the bar was a moment to remember what it had meant to her.
“More than college, more than any other business training that I’ve had, making my way as an artist and a musician and gaining momentum and doing it with such a collective group of people, it just felt like a really special moment in time,” she said.
A previous version of this story incorrectly noted the first name of one of the bingo hosts. He is Tom Heinl, not Todd Heinl.
