Ropewalk Tavern
1209 South Charles Street
Baltimore, MD 21230
(410) 727-1298

Dear Pubcrawlers,

We use to list the Ropewalk Tavern in Baltimore, Maryland on this page. We listed them from February 2002 - December 8, 2003. They had 15 active reviews and about the same that were deleted over the past several months.

Marc McFaul and brother William McFaul are the owners of Ropewalk Tavern and through their attorney Christy Saunders they are seeking to legally silence us for providing a free speech public forum for people to post candid reviews of Ropewalk Tavern here on Pubcrawler.com through our user reviews section. They claim we were causing them a loss of business due to the negative reviews that were included among their 15 reviews. They also are threatening to sue us for using their trademark image which is shown here to promote their own establishment:

Ropewalk Tavern is threatening to sue us even if we use a photograph which contains their logo. We believe their request with regards to their trademark is overbearing and excessive and detracts from the value Pubcrawler provides to it’s visitors and establishments.

From February 2002 until December 8, 2003 Ropewalk Tavern enjoyed receiving in excess of an estimated 100 new customers who used Pubcrawler to find Ropewalk Tavern. All of this was free of charge and without any input from Ropewalk Tavern.

After several reviews of questionable intent and several others that questioned the beer condition and management’s interaction with patrons Marc McFaul contacted us to remove his establishments. This was only after Marc Mc Faul took a few swings at the review submission process and rated his place as AWESOME in an attempt to drive his rating up and then posted some nonsense about something we have no clue about involving some vendor, him, gift certificate owners and not redeeming those gift certificates when people presented them at Ropewalk Tavern. After trimming several reviews for Marc Mc Faul that we thought lacked input on the beer and included a negative tone we were contacted again to remove Ropewalk Tavern. This time we were more cautious about hiding the reviews our visitors were posting in favor of promoting an establishment that seemed to have several legitimate issues. Someone even assumed his brother’s name to post a review.

Our visitors said bad things such as, "... they do not pay attention to the condition of their taps.." and "... beers taste contaminated" along with "... The owner came over and treated me like dirt". The reviews were at times from credible Pubcrawler’s who have an established history of visiting beer focused places through their numerous reviews.

The turning point where Marc Mc Faul and his lawyer Christy Saunders became one logical unit of legal harassment was after we encouraged Marc to work with us to outreach to these reviewers who seemed to have legitimate issues and work with them to make their Ropewalk Tavern experience a better one. We thought providing this sort of customer support was exactly the most key component of the core definition of the SERVICE INDUSTRY.

So here’s what we are saying:
1. Marc McFaul and Christy Saunders are trying to silence freedom of speech here and you should be mad. There trying to pervert the methods called Pubcrawler which have worked well since 1995. Long before they were anywhere near good beer.
2. Ropewalk Tavern is in the mode of intimidating people with the threats of being bothered by the hassles, costs and travel involved with defending a suit.
3. In all the years Pubcrawler has operated there have been a number of famous flurries of reviews, some offensive, some non relative. We have never removed any place for any reason other than closure or not having an adequate beer selection.
4. We only sanitize and remove reviews when our visitors say enough is enough or an establishment owner asks us to remove things that are clearly off topic. We are not publishers and we do not provide any editorial services except when necessary to trim offensive materials or correct something for a user upon request.
5 . Ropewalk Tavern could have problems with their management and customer focusing care based on our own experience in trying to interact with them.
6 . You should consider other beer focused places nearby instead of Ropewalk Tavern- we don’t want them getting business and they don’t want listed here. There is a list of nearby places on the left column of this page.
7. If you believe you are sick / have food poisoning due to eating at Ropewalk Taven we are unable to help you. You can however contact the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
8. We are unfamiliar with Marc McFaul and company. We have never been to their establishment or even in their town. They are as familiar to us as Eddie Izzard.
9. If you are concerned about matter such as these and want to learn more or need an admirable non-profit for that end of year tax-deduction see:

If you are interested in more gossip about companies and things like this, visit our friends at:

...and what we aren’t saying:
1. We aren’t saying Ropewalk Tavern has any problems with regards to making people sick. That is they don’t have any known problems with food-borne illnesses such as botulism, e-coli, hepatitis, salmonella or staphylococci that we are aware of.
2. Ropewalk Tavern’s beer quality, storage and serving methods have been questioned via our formerly democratic and free speech forums - but you can’t see them now - so beer buyer beware.

If you want to reach us about this please use our contact form.

We’ll be posting letters, email and all other materials received from our friends at Ropewalk Tavern to this page. Stay tuned!

Want to speak up about this? Do so on the form below. Your comments will be added to this page and it is TOTALLY ANONYMOUS to protect you against evil 8-headed lawyer monster and the ’client’ they ’represent’.