Last of the Great Boozers

 

There are not many of them left... the last of the proper bars, pubs, boozers, dives, whatever one wishes to call them and i can count myself lucky as having been a regular and not so regular patron at one of the greatest bars known to humankind, lately i've made it a point to get back to it even though i live a bit further away than i once did... at one time i lived a short drive from the joint, with a secret knowledge of backroads that let me basically get to and from the place while never having to worry about the police, yes i understand this was not the most responsible of things but back then (and maybe even now) i wasn't the most responsible of sorts.... but this place is like an old and comfortable shirt that one can put on, it always feels great and never seems to go out of style... 

It was on one of my recent trips to the place (i won't give the name but if one really wants to know i'll email it) that the bartender and i, an absolute fucking legend when it came to the art of bartending, were discussing when he started working there and when i started wandering in, the year was 1996... i sat there for a second and said, fucking hell, i've been coming here for more than half my life, over 28 years... i first became aware of the place when i was on the payroll of one Hippie Jack... Hippie Jack lived right up the hill from the place on a main boulevard, the no man's land as i called it, the perfect place for a guy slinging weed and acid (and later coke), the place where the truly down and out lived, the hood is one Polish Hill and the street Hippie Jack lived on separated Polish Hill from the Hill District, both hoods when i started patronizing the bar had seen better days, like most of the neighborhoods i hung in back then (i've often wanted to print up shirts about another hood in the Burgh reading I Hung Out in Lawrenceville When it was Dangerous... seeing as now it's been fully gentrified)... it was Hippie Jack who told how great the place was which was funny because he was a card carrying hippie, a Deadhead and Zappa freak while this place was squarely in the world of punk and post-punk and whatever else the cool kids were listening to... and yes i counted myself among those cool kids though we'd never cop to that cuz that wouldn't be cool, dig? 

Oddly enough i never went to the place with Hippie Jack or ever actually saw him there, in fact by the time i really started hanging there Hippie Jack was dead, my friend a well documented casualty of the first wave of pure and cheap heroin... his wake was held at this bar... it was around this time that i had become a well known face to both my favorite bartender and the owner, the owner not much older than me who may or may not have been in the same game as i was (sort of) and who was wise enough to sink his money into real estate, buying this bar and several other properties in the neighborhood while shit was still cheap, these days it ain't so cheap anymore and one can probably guess where this is going... 

So what in fact makes this a great bar? the greatest bar i've ever had the privilege of frequenting... well it obviously starts with the world's greatest bartender but there is more... like a fucking absolutely stellar jukebox, in fact even to this day there is no "internet jukebox" in the place, there was one for a month or two but when the new kids started playing shit music it was quickly axed and the old one reinstalled... the music on it is fucking brilliant, it's the old flip type juke where you press the button and the CDs flip past, all of them curated by employees or patrons, there are almost no full albums but there are too many brilliant songs to count, in fact just the other night i walked in to Joy Division playing, when the juke stopped i walked over and put some money in and played songs by Can, the Misfits, Motley Crue (the owner's favorite band), Velvet Underground, Jesus and Mary Chain, The Stooges, The Replacements and the Buzzcocks, just to name a few, it's eclectic in the best sense of the word, one would be hard pressed to find a shit tune on it, the CDs all have hysterical names like Fuck Your Feelings or Communism Sucks designed to piss off or crack up whoever may be pouring money into it... it's fucking fantastic... 

What else? well let's start with the fact it's one of the last boozers anywhere that one can still smoke in, not that i have touched a cigarette in ages but i am of a certain age... back in the day one could almost retrace their steps, identify the bars they were in, by the aroma on their clothes... back in the day this place would be so smoky on weekend nights you could barely see, it's not like that anymore but the fact is you can still light up (and it makes it much easier to hit the weed pen which i do rather regularly when i'm there), i'm not even sure if it's actually legal to let people smoke, when the law was finally passed there were the usual battles, somehow one could still smoke in the casino and many of the bar owners protested saying it gave said casino and unfair advantage, i'm not sure one can smoke in the casino anymore but there are still a few bars that allow it and they just so happen to be my favorite ones, there is one in Lawrenceville that still allows it, another legendary hangout though not quite on par with this place though it definitely tried to be (it's not coincidence the guy who bought the place once worked at the bar i'm writing about)... so while most of the Millennials and Gen Z set will never have the pleasure of breathing massive amounts of second hand smoke or waking up smelling like an ashtray in the morning they can still get a taste of it if they know where to look... 

The beauty of this place is the fact that it's now been there for multiple generations, the old heads like me can rub elbows and converse with the kids and it's always interesting to watch the kids be cool and act like no one had ever done this before, luckily i can say i was pretty much in from the beginning at this place, started frequenting it shortly after the owner took it over and turned it into the beautiful dive it has become, as an old head i'm afforded a certain amount of respect by the kids, a funny thing cuz i think i'm still one, but they see how the bartender and some of the long time staff and patrons treat me, sometimes they hear stories about what a fucking maniac i used to be, how the old bouncer was scared to death of having to deal with me on my drug and booze fueled nights but the reality is it's a beautiful thing to watch the generations shoot the shit, trade stories, talk music or drugs or any number of things... 

There is the graffiti of the bathroom (above photo) and backroom walls, like a history of hipsters wrought out in magic marker on walls that no one bothers to repaint anymore, i believe they were repainted once, roughly twenty odd years ago but now have been dutifully marked up... the back room has been host to many a local and even national bands (recently a killer crew from Cincy called the Drins, i caught a great and i believe no defunct band called Merchandise there, The Eddy Current Suppression Ring from Australia played there one night, as well as many of the "rock stars and actors" who hear about the place and stop by thinking they'll get the rock star treatment... they don't, which is hysterical, one would think by now the word would be out and they'd know better but they don't, see the night Russell Crowe showed up only to be constantly referred to as Mel Gibson or Mad Max... even better is the fact the back room, on weeknights or non-band weekend nights, has a pool table and ping pong table and a pinball machine, all of which have been there since i started drinking there, i've played more than a few epic games of ping pong, (it's surprising how competitive the cool kids can get when it comes to shit like ping pong) as well as many an hour drinking and playing pinball, it's the type of place i can walk in by myself and speak to no one or end up in deep or meaningless conversations...

Most importantly it was a place with a "lock-in", if one was in the know, when last call came around one didn't have to leave, the regular folks were shuffled out the door but there would always be 20 or so of us who were allowed to stay, black shades were drawn to cover the windows, the door was locked and jukebox turned down, we couldn't "buy" drinks but could tip heftily and one could stay until the birds were singing their morning tunes, i've stood behind the bar towards 5am pouring people beers and sweeping up, it's a glorious fucking existence let me tell you, the barfly night owls of the world all hanging out and laughing, sharing the drugs that were left, having that last drink, then heading off into the early morning to get breakfast or go to bed... 

It's also one of those places with a sneaky good kitchen, a kitchen that has long served the fare of the hoods namesake, Polish Hill, where the pierogies are local and excellent, the kielbasa made locally and an assortment of wings that are fucking stellar (the Old Bay and butter being my favorite), yes one can get almost any fried app and the fact is one doesn't come here for dinner but when the munchies, booze or otherwise, kick in there is always something to satisfy... and it won't set you back a ton either..

Which brings us to the next bit... or what i call the "whitening" aka gentrification... i've written about this before, years ago actually when the dreaded little disease had come to Lawrenceville and began gobbling up that neighborhood, what was once a working class neighborhood in the shadows or more correctly ghost, of a shuttered steel mill was then becoming the new hip spot to live, one could still get cheap houses, there were still dive bars and local restaurants and one could argue there still are it's just  now many of the houses have been bought up and remodeled, a house that once went for $70,000 now runs roughly $350,000 or more, granted this has taken 15 years or so but one gets the idea... part of it was the new Children's Hospital that went along with a huge cancer center up the road in Bloomfield/Shadyside, my old hoods, which brought in a ton of professionals looking to move closer to their work, in fact when i put my little old house in Bloomfield up for sale it took exactly one day for it to sell, i had multiple offers, over a dozen people look at it, and that was all within 24 hours of hitting the market, one could walk to the either one of these hospitals and that didn't even include the other one (where the boyos were both born) up the street from me... and while Lawrenceville is still a great neighborhood it's insane how much it's changed, high end condos in every available old warehouse or building that was once used for industry, others razed and built with "luxury apartments" and while i understand it's supposedly good for the city and all it's not good for everyone... see those displaced by increased taxes and land value and made offers on houses they have lived in for years... at this point the gentrification is complete and there's not many (if any) affordable houses left... 

LoLa, as it's called, just about touches the one end of Polish Hill, a tiny hood (Lawrenceville being the biggest in the city) but one that has always been a haven for cheap living, hipsters and hoods all sharing the same space... that is until recently... now it's being gobbled up and changing, part of the beauty of Polish Hill were the three local boozers and a few locally owned shops, it was a cool little hood tucked away in a hillside and easily accessible to the everything, honestly i'm surprised it's taken this long... one is a short drive/bicycle ride away from downtown, Oakland (see University of Pittsburgh) and the Shadyside/Bloomfield/LoLa medical industrial complex, in short a brilliant location... but things have begun to change and not necessarily for the better... 

The aforementioned bars and businesses are what made this neighborhood, it's a gem, (not to mention the famous Polish church the pope once visited) but now the money is moving in... on returning to my all-time favorite boozer on a somewhat regular basis (which means once or twice a month for the old geezer) i was floored by all the remodeled row houses, all gutted and refurbished, the new apartments, the fact one of the bars at the one end of the neighborhood has gone full sports bar/yuppy enclave... of course my bar and one up the street haven't changed but the bar up the street has one advantage, it's on a corner and not smack dab in the middle of a residential street, now it appears the asshole who bought the house next to the bar has become the biggest proponent of getting my favorite boozer shut down.. the place is the reason a lot of people loved this hood, had kept this neighborhood viable when no one wanted to come here and yet some rich asshole moves in and suddenly it's got to go... granted the bar owner had built up a cache of goodwill and a large number of supporters but the resident dickhead is just waiting for a fuck-up so he can scream nuisance bar and shutter the place... fuck him in no uncertain terms... 

Of course on the lot to the left of the bar the old building has been demolished and of course a new house/apartments will be built which i'm sure will bring more pressure on my beloved boozer, none of the new residents would be the type to frequent this type of establishment i'm guessing, which is probably good, the cigarette smoke, the occasional patron in the bathroom stall doing blow (which warms this old wastoid's heart as in my youth, well let's just say i'm not unfamiliar with car keys in a bathroom stall) would i'm sure disgust the fucking yuppie scum who have infiltrated the neighborhood... and yes that's what i call them, hell i'd love to have a bar like this anywhere in my lily white suburb but alas i do not, not even close, it ain't that cool out here... but at least i know that i can get into the city and get back to my roots and i'll be damned if i'm gonna let some wanker try to shutter my favorite boozer... but for now it's steady as she goes, i'll pull up a seat at the bar, drink my Red Stripe and hit the weed pen, play my tunes, maybe have some of those delicious wings and enjoy this lovely island of misfit toys that i have patronized for close to 30 years... (fuck i'm old)