Part I: Summer’s End

To explain the appeal of McGlinchey’s to the uninitiated is an exercise in futility: you either get it or you don’t. But that hasn’t stopped me from trying to pen a eulogy for one of my favorite watering holes in the world.

Admittedly, it’s a tired story. One told before: by summer’s end, McGlinchey’s will be no more.

My illustration of McGlinchey’s, available on Etsy.

Of course, we only come to appreciate what we had when it’s gone. But with McGlinchey’s, I can’t really name what we’re losing, only what’s already been lost. If you didn’t experience it, I can’t expect you to care. But I think you should, because I know in my heart that the ache I feel is one that you nurse, too — you just may not recognize it anymore.

These days, numbness feels familiar.

Part II: The Enigma of Arrival

Thresholds are strange spaces; to arrive is always to confront what you’ve carried all along.

Standing before its post-and-lintel, McGlinchey’s strikes me as unassuming, as bars should be, the opposite of clean and well-lighted spaces Hemingway famously valorized. From the outside, a fifty-year-old sign reads: “McGlinchey’s Bar: Sandwiches.” (They no longer serve sandwiches.)

The mixed cursive and serif text is set on an outdated, skeuomorphic wood panel, haloed by a putrid Irish green. An outline of a shamrock is vaguely discernible, suspended, like an apostrophe, above the terminal ‘R.’ Below, a neon-red sign advertises “DRAUGHT BEER,” almost as an afterthought.

Though the building was initially designed by Hoffman-Henon — the architectural firm behind the Boyd Theatre — the only other outwardly notable feature of the three-story building is a pair of stained glass windows, composed of mismatched trapezoids and parallelograms of reclaimed glass.

This mostly featureless exterior keeps influencers away. Effete aesthetes looking for a prettied-up experience know to look elsewhere. A review on Trip Advisor puts it bluntly: “If you, for some crazy reason, would like lung cancer (secondhand smoke), prostate cancer (crappy hotdogs), or liver cancer (low-quality liquor), this is absolutely the place for you.” Similarly, I once overheard a dandied passerby say to their date, “Don’t ever go in there—that’s the shadiest bar in Philadelphia.”

I couldn’t help but smile as I bit my tongue.

I’ve walked into McGlinchey’s after attending black-tie events and Philadelphia’s white-tie balls. I’ve gone in wearing a suit, or in my usual attire of a collarless button-down and carpenter’s pants. I normally roll-up on my skateboard, following the same route: down 13th, right on Sansom, before turning south on 15th. It’s the only place in Philadelphia I feel comfortable regardless of my attire: where monogrammed shirts and ratty tees appear cut from the same cloth, where people expect shapeshifters.

Admittedly, plucking up the courage to enter can feel a little bit like cave diving. It’s not unsafe, only unnerving, requiring a certain comfort with dark, unfamiliar spaces. But once you’re in, the bar feels like being embraced by an old friend, returned from an epic voyage, altered but somehow the same.

Part III: The Decoy in the Cave

Upon entering, what you first notice is a landscape of residue: cave walls layered with smoke and memory, sedimentary strata of a life lived indoors, resisting the ebb of time.

McGlinchey’s stockpile before close of business.

Overhead, the ceiling still bears the stain of decades of cigarette and pipe smoke. The horseshoe-shaped bar encourages a kind of environmental voyeurism. Drinks are always cheap, never fancy; despite peddling beer and booze, they take quiet pride in knowing how to pour a Guinness. Packs of Marlboros, American Spirits, and Parliaments lie supine next to bottles of dead or wounded soldiers.

The whole bar is cast in a warm, red tint from recessed lighting. The central chandelier hasn’t been cleaned in years, caked in soot, ash, dust bunnies, and cobwebs. (At any given time, four of the candelabra bulbs are shot.) It’s flanked by two rotary fans, whirling away the hours at frenetic speed, like the haywire pocket watch of the time-obsessed White Rabbit in Alice In Wonderland. “Oh dear, oh dear — I shall be late…” I perennially am. In the summer, the twin A/C units blasting at 68 degrees recall Henry Miller’s characterization of America as “the air-conditioned nightmare.”

The bathrooms are part of the experience: filthy, plastered with graffiti and slap stickers, reeking of ash and piss. The door to the men’s room has no lock. The women’s bathroom, the one with a latch, is marked by a sign that reads: “Groups of people entering the women’s bathroom will be banned.” (I’ll let you guess what behaviors they’re hoping to deter.)

The main U-bar seems designed for a strip club: voyeurs ringed around a central stage. Only here there’s no stage, no spectacle—save the lone bartender, made to dance like a ballerina on point: twirling and spinning, head on swivel, always returning to the same fixed spot to refill an empty glass.

To the right, a wall of mirrors reflects not pasties and g-strings, but hazy, refracted portraits of patrons.

To the left, a beautiful hand-painted ARCO billboard hangs like a relic: a hunter in a maroon shirt stooping to place a decoy duck on a placid lake.

Far from making me think of greener pastures, it reminds me of the opening scene of the Sopranos, when a depressed Tony wades — partially-clothed in his bathrobe and boxers — into his suburban pool, ebulliently trying to get his disaffected family to pay attention to the ducks learning to fly.

Increasingly, I feel that scene captures the experience of being an artist: forever attempting to share in experiences.

How this billboard came to be here is the stuff of speculative barroom lore. But Dennis Carlisle, a journalist and fellow McGlinchey’s lover, has the offered most definitive account: McGlinchey’s was a lunchtime hotspot for Atlantic-Richfield employees, whose East Coast offices were nearby. Employees would exit through the back door of their office building in order to enter through the back door at McGlinchey’s. So appreciative were they of their local watering hole that they gifted McGlinchey’s two billboards from an ad campaign.

Today, only one remains, and who knows for how much longer.

It seems we no longer know how to support that which we love. Our declining dollar is simply not enough, and we lack the will to safeguard third spaces. There’s so much being lost around us all the time, we can no longer galvanize ourselves around a shared understanding of what’s worth saving.

McGlinchey’s is filled with remnants, anachronistic artifacts. While the world outside might exist in the eternal present, here, the past feels like a second skin.

For me, this bar is part of a lineage. Bars have always been important to artists, spaces to gather and create. In my own vivid imagination, it reminds me of Max’s Kansas City, the famous New York haunt of Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Donald Judd, William Burroughs, Robert Rauschenberg, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Divine, Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, Willem De Kooning, David Johansen, Tom Verlaine, Patti Smith, Robert Mapplethrope, and Mick Jagger. It was “the intersection of everything,” according to William S. Burroughs, a description equally befitting McGlinchey’s.

Philadelphia has always been a more of blue-collar town than New York. People don’t come seeking fame and wealth; the streets aren’t paved with gold . We may not have an internationally famous roster of talent, but Philadelphia is an artists’ town: small enough for community, big enough to hide in plain sight.

By contrast, these days New York feels like a city for the creative class, those who know how to monetize. Patti Smith put it bluntly: “New York has closed itself off to the young and the struggling. New York City has been taken away from you. So my advice is: find a new city.”

It’s said that every scene has a death cycle: first the artists, then the hipsters, then the bankers, then it’s over. I may have found my new city in Philadelphia, but New York still lives in my cultural imagination.

My mother, for instance, likes to regale me with stories of Area, the 1980s New York nightclub that featured a swimming pool and a tank filled with live sharks. I read about it The New York Times. “Area was a nightclub that was like art,” according to Glenn O’Brien, New York’s preeminent culture writer. Of course, artists made it happen: David Hockney flew in to paint the pool. Warhol made T-shirts. Barbara Kruger painted on the wall. Basquiat, Alex Katz, Jenny Holzer and Tom Wesselmann collaborated on the windows. Larry Rivers did a sculpture of two guys having sex. Sex, naturally, was an ongoing theme at Area. Supposedly, people used to have sex between the projectors and the screen, a display of shadow exhibitionism. It was all riotously inventive, wildly unprofitable, and suddenly gone, reduced to “a pile of pictures of a lost dream […] now history,” along with the world that inspired it.

Everywhere I’ve been — Hong Kong, Tokyo, Taipei, Singapore, San Francisco, New York, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Paris, London, Lisbon, Rio, Mexico City, Quito, Copenhagen, St. Petersburg — I’ve always been plagued by the sense of arriving too late. Like Tony Soprano, I’m haunted by the feeling that: “I came in at the end. That the best is over.”

Instead, my favorite places, like McGlinchey’s, feel like memory palaces. I’m less a patron than paleontologist, excavating stories from forgotten fragments.

“What’s the deal with that bouquet?” I asked one day, gesturing towards a collection of lavender foliage to left of till. “That’s Ducky’s seat,” was all I was offered, by way of explanation. Ducky, Dave, was a regular, who always sat in the same spot by the register. He worked at the flower shop and brought a small bouquet with him everyday. When he died, suddenly, unexpectedly, the staff took it upon themselves to keep the tradition alive. They even made a plaque, commemorating his seat.

The plaque is now gone. The flowers, wilted.

What we’re left with is absence, like the chalkboard signs that line the bar’s perimeter: never up-to-date, advertising once-stocked libations. They remind me of headstone rubbings, with names familiar but obsolete.

Part IV: Faces Look Ugly, When You’re Alone

If you initially gravitate to McGlinchey’s for the ambiance, you end up staying for the people, who invariably recall Jim Morrison’s crooning: “People are strange, when you’re a stranger, faces look ugly, when you’re alone.”

The central bar is occupied by the more gregarious barflies, those looking to strike up a conversation. The booths, on the other hand, are occupied by solitary old-timers and tight-knit groups less prone to mingling.

The bar’s patrons run the gamut: smokers, suits, artists, punks, musicians, dead-beats, addicts, retirees, and the unhoused. It’s a space where leftist professors brush up against Trump-sympathetic business men. I’ve met closeted gay Boomers, and outspoken queer-identifying Zoomers; gender essentialists and gender non-conformists sitting side by side, throwing the occasional side-eyed glance toward each other, before returning to look straight ahead.

Here, regardless of race, gender, religion, political-affiliation, sexual-orientation, or ethnicity, all co-mingle. It’s not always pleasant, but it holds. The delicate, tenuous balance is upheld by the three simple rules: no photos, no politics, and no pugnaciousness. (NOTE: I was given permission to document the bar in its final days.)

The anarchist philosopher Hakim Bey has a term for these kinds of spaces: Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ): “The TAZ is like an uprising which does not engage directly with the State, a guerrilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to reform elsewhere, elsewhen before the State can crush it.”

TAZ is by definition, a temporary, liminal space, on the edges or margins of society. They are designed to decay. What survives, though, is not the walls or the leases, but the unlikely constellations of people that gather together.

My weekly crew consisted of Fred—a highly literate retired IRS agent who loves Joseph Conrad, Thomas Bernhardt, and Andrew Solomon—and Drew, a preppy, ginger-haired linguistics professor who loves to talk Saussure. Though I saw them week in and week out, I’ve made many, many friends at McGlichey’s: Bailey, Bella, Little Faith, Jibs, and Alfred to name a few.

It is the kind of space where you’re simultaneously free to come as you are and also unburden yourself of any unwanted encumbrances. Where you can always pull up a stool and chat with the person next to you. For the most part, and for whatever reason, people choose to leave their phones in their pockets. Some commune with the sound of silence, while others insulate themselves with a book — William Gibson, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Tony Tulathimutte, Octavia Butler are some of the authors I’ve seen reflected in broken spines.

Service was often slow and the staff semi-notoriously surly; not from lack of manners, but from a deep well of lived experience. There’s Tabitha—a heavily-tattooed brunette who has probably swatted away more barflies than she’s actually served—likes to do the cross-word, or Sudoku, during her shift. Tatham is a busty, boisterous blonde who loves to weigh in on customers’ astrological horoscopes. (She knows I’m a Gemini and my wife is an Aquarius.) Matt is a no-nonsense bartender, with his 6’ 2” frame and prominent chess tattoo conveying a kind of authority that is hard to name. There’s also Sam, who wears an upside down cross that hangs off of one earlobe.

But when I think of McGlinchey’s, I always think of J. I know him as J, but his name is Jason, one of my favorite bartenders in the city: an affable, unassuming man who has seen life from all angles. A lover of history and architecture, he enjoys sharing quips about Philadelphia’s under-celebrated contributions to city planning. I believe he has an unused masters degree, like me.

I’ve never seen Cheers!, having grown up overseas without American television, but McGlinchey’s has a certain affinity with that fictional watering hole. It’s a place where everyone knows you just enough to greet you, but not too much to know your business. These spaces of soft-connection, or loose ties, are increasingly hard to come by, especially in America.

In 2000, Robert Putnam wrote a book called Bowling Alone, which called attention to many of the social issues we’re finally getting around to acknowledging a quarter of a century later. By 2023, for instance, the US Surgeon’s General had proclaimed a loneliness epidemic, explicitly highlighting the loss of casual connections as a key driver. He compared the public health crisis to being as deleterious as a pack a day smoking habit.

But Putnam began sounding the alarm on these worrying trends well before the public was willing to take them seriously. The book’s title comes from the astute observation that while participation in bowling leagues has declined precipitously, the number of people bowling was actually increasing, leading to his cutting observation: “The game hasn’t disappeared, but the social aspect has.”

By contrast, Alexis de Tocqueville — the French emigre, who first wrote about his impressions of America from 1835 to 1840 — noted that America had a habit of forming “voluntary associations.” He cited these as the lifeblood of democracy. Indeed, there’s a strong correlation between social organization and positive outcomes in education, safety, health, and democracy itself. Putnam agrees, arguing: “People divorced from community, occupation, and association are first and foremost among the supporters of extremism.”

I first started coming to McGlinchey’s to escape my own loneliness. I think many people did.

Part V: Attack on Memory

I’m writing this at my typical window: 2pm to 4pm, when I occasionally sip a substance and do some writing. (I try not to drink too much these days, but this is the one space where I give myself a pass.)

After highnoon, it’s usually quiet, but today it’s abnormally bustling, as people have come out in droves to hoist a last glass. The familiar din of laughter, debate, and commiseration provides cover for the fact that bar has run out of ash trays and glasses. Instead of pint glasses, we’re drinking out of Dixie cups, which makes the whole place feel reminiscent of a college party. A reporter and her photographer have shown up to try to capture what it is that makes this place special. I offered my two cents, knowing it would likely fall on deaf ears, while taking quiet comfort with the knowledge that we’re constantly endeavoring to recreate the past.

—

America used to be the country of the frontier, the future, the city on a hill. But there’s no longer a sense of westward expansion, of Manifest Destiny. We simply have nowhere left to go.

Instead, nostalgia — our longing for an imagined, idealistic past — has replaced our dreams of the future, which is looking increasingly dystopic. As people wake up to the idea that the techno-optimist’s future might hold less promise than advertised, we’re returning to the comforts of yore: Gen Z to Web 1.0, millennials to craft, trad wives to the bucolic homestead, the alt-right to an imagined white ethno-state.

While we can’t agree on what we wish to revive, there seems to be a collective desire for a modern Lazarus. It’s no wonder that Trump was able to rally people, willing to look the other way, under his banner: “Make America Great, Again.”

After all, aren’t all wars, cultural or ideological, conflicts for competing memories? Perhaps that’s the appeal of the past: it provides soft, unfirm ground where we can dream, but not dwell.

For me, personally, none of these nostalgic promised lands hold much appeal. Instead, I’ve found myself returning to interrogating the nature of time itself, having long been enamored with non-Western conceptions of time: Inquit, Sami, Andean, Mayan, Australian, Polynesian, or Native American. Most recently, I’ve found myself taken with the work of John Mbiti, the pre-eminent Kenyan philosopher.

According to him, West African communities believe that time has to be experienced in order to be realized. In other words, it is events that create time rather than vis-a-versa. As such, “the future” does not exist. Instead there are only two, not three, temporal concepts of value:

Sasa refers to the present, immediate/near future, and the recent past.

Zamani refers to the communal and mythic past, safeguarded by collective history and oral tradition.

Events move from Sasa to Zamani when they can no longer be recalled by individuals, but live on in the half-life of ancestral memory.

These transferences of knowledge require communal co-presence. Throughout various West African traditions, knowledge is not abstracted, but communally embodied through collective practice. Chant (whether in ceremonies, rites, or work songs) constitutes a rhythmic synchronization of breath, of voice, of body. This has epistemological significance, establishing the preconditions for communion. Only when all have joined, have synched, can teaching through storytelling begin.

The Bantu word ubuntu, “I am because we are,” is perhaps the most well-known concept derived from this tradition. First made famous in the West by Nelson Mandela, ubuntu asserts the interdependence of humans, the acknowledgment of one's responsibility toward each other and the world around them. It is a philosophy of collectivism, not individualism.

Books have always seemed to me like the nearest approximation of America’s social memory, something similar to zamani, while our media (movies, articles, paintings, photographs) form the collective subconscious.

I always bring a book with me to McGlinchey’s. It functions like a calling card, an invitation to dive into a conversation about philosophy, linguistics, literature, or metaphysics. To some, it may seem like affect. To me, it’s a bid for connection.

—

I always think of a particular scene in Mad Men, from the episode For Those Who Think Young (S2:E1), when Don Draper walks into a bar at lunchtime.

He sits down next to a beatnik, reading Frank O’Hara’s Meditations In An Emergency, who eyes him uncertainly.

Don initiates conversation, gesturing toward the book, “Is it any good?”

The beatnik gives him the once over, evaluating his suit, before replying: “I don’t think you’d like it.”

After a pause, he continues. “He wrote a lot of it here, you know. Some on 23rd street.”

Don replies: “Makes you feel better about sitting in a bar at lunch. Makes you feel like you’re getting something done.”

The beatnik replies, skeptically, “Yeah. It’s all about getting things done.”

—

Some days I feel like Don Draper, others like the beatnik, stuck in a state of suspension between the two like an M.C. Escher painting.

I don’t know if I’m getting anything done. I don’t know if this is any good. But this feels haltingly, falteringly true.

These days, the chaos of writing feels more real than weighing in on an emergent new world order. “Chaos comes before all principles of order and entropy,” says Bey, “it’s neither a god nor a maggot, its idiotic desires encompass and define every possible choreographs […] its masks are crystallizations of its own facelessness, like clouds.”

The masked facelessness of McGlinchey’s is composed of many miens: tired, hopeful, downtrodden, content. I watch them drift by, flotsam of the river of time, even as I contemplate my own. I’ve been told I look young for my age, thirty-five, but I feel so much older—my shirt is now torn at the shoulder.

They’ve been calling this a wake, but it feels more like the sack of Rome. We’re simply seeking shelter, choosing to ignore the storm all around us. The paintings are being pulled down, the liquor is running dry, the tap heads have been removed, chalkboards wiped clean.

I’ve moved over a dozen times over the course of my life and the sights and sounds of moving (the cardboard boxes, the crop circles in the carpet) always bring me a certain kind of grief, a reminder of how active the process of forgetting is, as we are forced to choose what to let go of and what to hold on to.

Sometimes I cling too tightly; others, too loosely.

Wouldn’t it be easier to just let go?

But I can’t let go, because McGlinchey’s forms part of a collective story, a Philadelphia story — one that hasn’t been carved in stone, painted in egg-tempera, caught on film, or even written down.

Instead, it cultivates an older, more protean form of knowledge sharing, one that offers a counter to the Chinese aphorism, “The faintest ink is better than the best memory.” For memory honors the inevitability of forgetting.

Part VI: The Parting Glass

“At McGlinchey’s, everything’s conjecture, confabulation,” I’ve been told.

A scene from the last days at McGlinchey’s

For me, that was always part of the appeal. Truth was never the dominant currency, only company. Wading in what the Irish call uisce beatha—the water of life—we sift through the salt while looking for sapphires. I’ve found many; I don’t know if you will. As a forager friend of mine once said, “I can tell you where to look, but I can’t promise what you’ll find.”

I began this project as an attempt to document the joys I first found in this unassuming, dingy bar. The community we built. The loneliness we stayed. But halfway through I was felled by the familiar feeling of futility: writing is always belated, arriving after a battle has already been fought. By the time we try to pin down what mattered most, it’s already in the slipstream.

Yet folk traditions remind us there are other ways of remembering. They teach us how to be present as we put our fingers in the stream of time, to be co-mingle with the experience, while allowing the river flow. They are incantatory, not archival: built up through words spoken, not carved; mutable, not indelible. Through repetition, they revive what is lost.

For me, McGlinchey’s belongs to that order of memory, of a collective hymn, of zamani.

So rather that close with my own words, I’ve borrowed those of an old Irish folk song, The Parting Glass, a ballad that says goodbye without ever letting go.

Of all the money that e’er I spent
I spent it in good company
And all the harm that ever I did
Alas it was to none but me
And all I've done for want of wit
To memory now I can't recall
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all.

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