Spilling the beans ain’t my scene and even though the bar closed in 1998, and most everyone is dead, this is the internet. An expensive coffee table book would at least weed out so many and give an aura of value and respect to the subject.
This could easily become a book length introduction and it will one day. I spent so much time here and because of the people, there is much to tell. I just don’t have the time. I have too much work. Joints like this you spend a good portion of your life when sleep, work and bar add up to a 24 hour cycle, at least, six days a week.
A proper introduction is still in the works because, but, like the Butte book, there’s too much material and too many characters, but also because i have spent so much time here for so many years, until it finally shut down.
Of all the places deemed working-class, and lumpen, if i had to pick the classic blue-collar ethnic joint, an old man’s bar and emblematic blue-collar corner neighborhood base, it was The Bar.
A Shot and a Beer
Yield: 1 drink
1 1/2 ounces whiskey
1 12-ounce can of beer
1. Set down the shot glass, preferably with a thud.
2. Pour the whiskey into the glass.
3. Set the can of beer next to the shot glass, also with a thud. Snap it open.
4. Drink the whiskey in one go.
5. Drink the beer at your leisure.
Buckeye is a neighborhood and a street. Its growth was tied to Hungarian immigrants who settled there, many to work in all of the many nearby factories. It became known as largest enclave of Hungarians in America.
Lower Buckeye was older and more industrial, where the first Hungarians settled, and immediately expanded up a long hill where the streets became more residential, with many churches and a long commercial strip running from East 110th to East 130th at the Shaker Heights border, that got buit up after World War I.
The Bar would also follow this growth of the Hungarians in this section of town.
An aerial photograph of Eberhard Manufacturing situated in Lower Buckeye. Buckeye Road is at the top right edge which is the commercial strip where so many bars had their home. The Hungarian section ran from East 65th Street up to East 130th Street and these blocks are in the eighties. Clearly factories and manufacturing dominated the city. Across the railroad tracks from Eberhard was the Van Dorn Company and off in the distance at the top right in the distance is the National Screw Company with many smaller shops all around.
The map was secured from the old administration building of the original Eberhard Manufacturing, during its demolition as the last building on the site.
In a city of bars, Buckeye had its share, one on every corner and more. Many were completely blue-collar places with very cheap drinks, but the was the Settler’s nightclub and restaurant at East 130th, and the Gypsy Inn with live entertainment at East 88th.
The Bar is representational of the old shot and a beer joints, it, slowly, over time, became the last of all the old Hungarian bars, and finally closed in May, 1998. It began on lower Buckeye around East 65th and moved to upper Buckeye in the 1940s. Run by the same family, it was in business as a Buckeye Road bar for over ninety years.
Across the street one block west the Hungarian Village closed in 1996. In the nineties, admittedly the crack and ho scene was outrageous and widespread. But the church-going black residents would protest, and carry signs on a Saturday night, even outside We, both black and white, woud mutter as we entered The Bar, “We’re a bunch of drunks. The crack is out here on the streets.” Somehow The Bar stayed open, but, with only seven people voting against the Hungarian Village across the street in another precinct, (the drunks don’t vote) it was closed. Forty-five years in operation.
It was basic. There was a wooden phone booth, juke box and bowling machine and more Bela and Joes per square foot than anywhere in America. Seagram’s, Paramount, Black Velvet, Echoe Springs, Old Granddad, Echo Springs, Black Velvet, Beefeater, Tangueray, Canadian Club, Jack Daniels and Kesseler.
The Bar served hamburgers that were actually really good. Every year the local glossy city magazine would print the top ten burgers in the city, and The Bar always made the list, and very high, but with a warning about going there. I think they used the word “crime” in relation to the place.
Now 22 years after its closing, with most all dead, the place is still shutdown.
The Moreland Theatre on Buckeye Road, five blocks from The Bar. It has been closed for a much longer time. It’s unusual to have all these buildings abandoned but stil intact for so long. It’s one of the very few places that could be gentrified on the east side since there is so little left of the commercial strips of neighborhoods
.The Bar in 2020. Since it closed in 1998 it’s remained like this. Doc, a Hungarian dentist who owned the building and lived in the back apartment is long gone. I knocked on the door in 2006 and an Eastern European man was living there, but does not remember anything about the place having not been here when The Bar was open.
The Bar made up less than half the building it was housed in. It had a very high ceiling, was narrow and long, and was a kind of hall, with hard walls and a high ceiling, so that the sound would echo and bounce around, and there would be a general and pronounced din to the place, particularly after 7:00 pm (Jeopardy). Front door, side door, open in summer, on a cloudy day, it could be a dark place.
The neighborhood, beginning in the seventies, on Lower Buckeye and the late eighties on Upper Buckeye. During this time the bar got more and more black customers. It was mostly black by the time it closed, but the bar lasted so long by a Hungarian owner, because it only cared that you drink and have fun.
If you were around back then, many ethnics hated blacks. And vice versa. And in a city that was generally a real race divided city, the fact that the bar evolved into a mostly black place by the time it closed, and never had any real trouble on any sort of “race” level.
Now that i brought up race, The Bar was the last Hungarian bar on the street. It also didn’t care what the color of your skin was. In a city, like Chicago, cut down the middle by two races, that could easily erupt if things went the wrong way, this town had hard-core racial hatred by both black and white that was not hidden back then. But in The Bar, if race mattered, it was always friendly, taking a second seat to one’s priorities – drinking, and was also instructive, comic and truthful.
Janet, a comic, bad, small woman, referred to the old immigrants, and probably all the white boys, as prairie dogs. And she should know. As Buckeye Road evolves, and strawberries would move in with the older immigrants men who all lived alone. It was completely respectable, the old-timers were too street smart to be completely taken. I think the basic reason was fun.
Home in an industrial city consists of 8 hours at home, 8 hours at work and 8 hours at the bar. It’s low prices made it an adult daycare center and a nighttime place to relese some steam and be social. They call um dive bars today. These joints are rare, listed and popularized. Everyone knows about them.
People talk about things they never experienced or really know about. Knowing takes place over time. The Bar itself, lived through n era of unprecedented industrial growth, then decline. The entire ethnic make-up of the neighborhood and bar changed, flipped might be a better word because it was swift. When i was younger beat cops would come in, sit at the bar with a walke talkie, and have a cold beer, by 1991, the bars were being raided by various law enforcement agencies, in the era of hyper-crime and crack.
Generally speaking the drama of seeing this city along with others, really just burn itself out, literally with arson, but also drugs, booze, bad food and violence, was unsurpassed. To see a city go so far down. But that was the world that The Bar was caught up in and survived as the last of the old bars on Buckeye.
The bar went down in an organic descent, and without fanfare, one day in May, 1998, Willie closed the doors for good, and it remains closed today (2021). One of the few distinctions of the common or plebeian is duration, and the stamina to get through things.
Somehow I ended up with the damn book. I started by saying that who wants to spill the beans on your friends and people I know in such a place internet? There’s a bunch of books hee that i have too much knowledge about, and i tend to be careful. Almost everyone from The Bar is dead, long dead, yet i wait to bring the images out. Some things can be said.
Sherm lived over on Kinsman, the next drag over, and on her way home from the bar she somehow launched her car so that it landed on the second floor porch of a duplex on 123rd Street just down from the Bar.
On the other hand I can tell you a story about really nice person for a job downtown. She was kidnapped, raped and was lucky to get out alive.
As far as strawberries go I got to know him some pretty good. I can tell you I did the best with a complete get a life.
Everybody, particularly the icons, had their favorite sayings. For Joe Kollar it was, “Blow it out your ass.” Junior would often say “Do you think this is easy?” Sherm, “I fell and i can’t get up.”
Wardell, known for getting kicked out of the bar, picked up a book of matches and went to work. While at work, at a meeting, he struck one of the matches to light a cigarette, and the whole pack went up. Hotel then went into the bar and informed Willy and told him that he was taking him to court in a lawsuit which he did. So it was dismissed. Later Wardell would show up, like a few other members of the bar had done, on the broadcast and print news because the s.w.a.t. team had shown up for him.
Many more and they were all characters – the Tamale Guy, Early Bird, the loanshark…
The Bar was truly a classless society, culturally speaking, in sort of the same way that the Three Stooges lacked nuance and sophistication were. Shaker Heights, a fancy suburb, once the wealthiest town in America up to the 1980s, is a mile away where Buckeye becomes South Woodland. But you would never know it anywhere on Buckeye, especially the Bar, its own utopia, in walking distance of the finest homes and swellest lives in the city.
As you can see with regards to friends, i’m not picky – whoever they we’re, no, not that picky, nor critical, unless you’re an asshole and a bull shitter.
VIEW the slideshow.
