E-Mail This Article to a Friend RAISING THE BAR Goodbye, Plough; hello, Linwood BY MIKE MILIARD

Last Friday, the bar at Cambridge’s redoubtable Plough & Stars was crowded with regulars talking baseball and watching soccer. The door was open, and the sunny breeze washing in was fresh. Owner George Crawley cleaned glasses amid billows of steam.

I asked him flat out. Is it true you’re closing?

"No," he said hurriedly, without looking up. "Funny how rumors go around."

But the rumors were true. Monday afternoon, the bar’s door was locked, the lights were off. Four years ago, former Phoenix writer and decades-long Plough denizen Chris Wright wrote in these pages that the bar, which opened in 1969, "is one of the last vestiges of the old Cambridge ... in your darker moments you wonder how much longer it can endure." For now, at least, its time looks to have arrived.

The Plough had been beleaguered for years. There were noise complaints. Popular bartenders left. The smoking ban didn’t help. For the moment, word on the street is that the place is closed indefinitely, and its regulars are without a home. As the scrawl on a chalkboard above the bar proclaimed last Friday: "Mama, don’t let your babies grow up to be Ploughboys."

But for every death, there’s a rebirth. After lying dormant and darkened for a year and a half, the back bar of the Fenway’s Linwood Grill is open again and will soon be booking music. Right now, it’s open only on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights (from 6 p.m. till 2 a.m.), and during every Red Sox home game. But in a month or so, look for it to go full time. Expect live music seven nights a week — rock on the weekends, blues and jazz during the week — and an extensive beer list featuring 20 draft lines and more than 100 bottles, including a menagerie of American craft-brewing masterpieces from Bear Republic Hop Rod Rye to Dogfish Head Raison d’Etre to Victory Golden Monkey.

Once upon a time, the Linwood was a musty, dingy haunt, the perfect place for a cheap beer and some loud punk rock. That’s changed. "We’re just looking for a good, clean place, nothing fancy," says owner Matt Dohanian, as he points out the heightened ceiling and the well-stocked, track-lit, re-lacquered bar whose centerpiece is a photograph of Ted Williams (supposedly a regular back in his Fenway days). "So far, everyone has absolutely loved it."

Well, not quite everyone. Dohanian tells of a guy, "obviously an old customer," who walked in after a ball game the other night.

"Too nice," he said as he turned on his heel to leave.

His loss.