In Texas, there's just about a bar for every type of person. You have your local dive bars with live music, your over-the-top downtown city life bars where you're sure to catch a glimpse of Matthew McConaughey, and of course bars with some really big country dance floors. What they didn't have was a bar themed after one of the most tragic events in U.S. history — 9/11. That is ... until now.

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Is this a joke?

I wish we could be exaggerating, but nope. It's very real and very open. It all started when a guy named Jesse Tyler passed by the bar asking himself, 'Huh, that couldn't be about what I think it's about, right?'. It meant exactly that. Tyler posted the photos of the bar to Twitter and the viral sensation took off from there.

Inside the bar are pictures of the Twin Towers on that fateful morning on September 11, 2001. As smoke can be seen billowing out of the buildings, the bar also has a list of posted times and what happened during those moments.

A sign posted inside one of the windows reads, "Bar9Eleven...more than a name ... more than a date ... a state of mind. Never forget, ever."


What did the owner have to say about it?

The bar's owner Brent Johnson spoke to Texas Monthly about the heat his business was getting on social media. Johnson said he believes that the name isn't in bad taste. He told the magazine that he saw a study one September that “80% of Americans” didn’t know that the anniversary of the event was approaching.

“I don’t want anyone who comes into my restaurant to forget that day,” Johnson said, recalling the way it felt to watch the events unfold as he opened his first Tex Mex restaurant in 2001.

Johnson says Bar9Eleven opened sometime between 2012 and 2014.

The internet isn't all that happy ... or all that upset

So let's venture back to Twitter, where folks there aren't that happy with what Johnson had to say.

"So many questions. Does this place get a lot of business?" one Twitter user said. "Do they realize it’s not paying tribute but exploiting the day? People, man."

Meanwhile, another Twitter user by the name of Michelle called the bar a "whole other dimension level of tacky."

Other users mocked the name claiming all sorts of conspiracy theories — ones I won't repeat here.

It won't be a bar I'll be visiting, but you can make that decision for yourself.

Remember that terrible mattress ad?

This isn't the first time a Texas business has caught hate surrounding 9/11. Back in 2016, a mattress store in San Antonio decided to run a Twin Tower sale where you could "get any mattress for a twin price!"

Yep. You can probably guess where this was headed.

The outrage came once the owner of Miracle Mattress seemed to push two employees into two stacks of twin mattresses as she screamed. She then ended the ad with "we'll never forget."

KEEP READING: Scroll to see what the big headlines were the year you were born

 

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