At the right is a photo taken at Miss Irene's bar after it closed, which ran with a story on the gentrification of Fells Point bars in 2004. Here's what reporter Scott Calvert said:

Now Miss Irene's, which closed two months ago, is for sale at $1.5 million.It joins a pub crawl's worth of neighborhood bars scattered near the water that are on the market, including the still-open Whistling Oyster ($850,000) and the Dead End Saloon ($2.1 million). At those prices, real estate agents say, a buyer almost certainly would have to add a new word - upscale - to make the investment worthwhile.

Well, he was right: Take a look at the soon-to-be-opened Miss Irene's Web site. The bar, once named Best Bar for Hard-Core Drinking by the City Paper, will now be a Mediterranean bistro.

I couldn't pin down proprietor Ben Greene to an opening date. All he would say is "sometime in the fall."

(Chiaki Kawajiri/Sun Photographer)