Old Town Goleta’s Mercury Lounge Closing Down

Owners of Old Town Goleta’s signature Mercury Lounge — home away from home for untold numbers of musical adventurers, beer lovers, and elbow-bending grad students in search of some retro-kitsch grit — announced they were pulling the plug on a club that first opened its doors in 1995. Owners Patrick and Jennifer Housh explained in a social media post that the intense financial pressures wrought by COVID did in the Merc, as their establishment was known. The Mercury’s final last call will take place March 31. The Mercury was started in 1995 by Dawn O’Brien, founder of Elsie’s, who in turn sold it two years ago with little loss of the club’s signature atmospherics. What happens to the site now remains a big unknown, but the Mercury’s address on the 5800 block of Hollister Avenue has been the site of bars and nightclubs dating back to 1957, the first being Gus’s.