In the urban bar-space continuum, enough space has been carved out for zones of noise and color that its ego-suppressing overstimulation can be had by anyone drawn towards that on any given night. It’s not hard to find quickly moving lights to distort your sense of time into obliviousness of how many drinks you’ve gulped in an hour’s time; this particular brand of hyper-non-reality is not exactly an endangered species.
What’s much scarcer are the more calm, unpretentious spaces in which, say, reading with a beer after work and talking over shots with local strangers are equally part of the whole deal. As it is in the art world, what is quieter and subtler is being pushed out of frame by its aggressively attention-grabbing counterparts, to be swallowed by a hard bottom line and diminishing capacities for attention and focus.
Because of how good to me Shenanigans has been in it’s roughly two-year life, I didn’t acknowledge its relative emptiness on Halloweekend as a sign of things to come. In my mind, that location would simply always be there as a place to meet people for meetings and interviews, to read and/or write, chew the fat, to act as an after-hours office. But one in which I could actually breathe.
As on this past Tuesday (in which I lost my day-job and then my country in the same twelve hours), the time came to curse my own lazy and cynical assumptions, bow for a moment of silence, then deal with practical ramifications: “Where else can I find that atmosphere in which to do my work? The goddamn El Bar?”, “What’ll be my go-to meeting spot when a chin wag on a collaborative project is needed? The goddamn El Bar?”, “Where else can my roommates and I grab a six-pack on the way home? The goddamn El Bar?” The answer to all of these is “I don’t know yet, but I know it’s not the goddamn El Bar.”
The bar in question, lovingly built with wood flooring from the old Palestra stadium and hanging a masonic temple sign leftover from a former incarnation of the building, will be transferred into the hands behind Standard Tap and Johnny Brenda’s, taking the emphasis off city-wides in favor of local spirits from Kensington’s row of distilleries. Dig their other two bars, though I do, I ultimately miss Shenanigans enough to be cautiously optimistic. Will there still be that healthy mix of sixth-generation Kenzo oldheads and underemployed guitarists from New Jersey? Will its bread and butter be happy hours based around networking for the people who’ve been trying to gentrify Eraserhood for four decades?
If this new place is socially and financially accessible to the same crowd, then I’ll actually be pretty okay with losing the rare and specific atmosphere I could once reliably find in those walls. If it’s a further tentacle of the Northern Liberties-style takeover moving further north and swallowing up local watering holes, consider conquering a different one next time. Consider the goddamn El Bar. •
