Foundation Bar: A Book Club in the Divine Lorraine's Old Speakeasy

The sign on the wall is the first thing you notice. Harry Hayman photographed it on a Tuesday evening at Foundation Bar, tucked into the basement of the Divine Lorraine on North Broad Street. It reads:

OUR BOOK CLUB CAN DRINK YOUR BOOK CLUB UNDER THE TABLE

The joke does considerable work. It tells you this is not a gathering that takes itself too seriously. It tells you drinking and reading share equal billing. And underneath the comedy, it makes a point that Harry Hayman finds himself returning to more often these days: that Philadelphia is a city with extraordinary places for people to come together, and that the people who live here would do well to use them more, not less. The book club carries the unofficial but official-sounding name of “My Bad Ass Book Club,” which Harry notes is the official Latin name. It meets on Tuesday evenings at 699 N Broad Street. The books get read. The drinks get drunk. The conversations go where they go. And in Harry Hayman’s estimation, that is exactly the kind of gathering Philadelphia needs more of.

The Divine Lorraine: A Building With a Long Memory

Not every bar gets to set up inside a building with a 130-year story. Foundation Bar does. The Divine Lorraine Hotel, which rises above the corner of North Broad Street and Fairmount Avenue, was designed by the Philadelphia architect Willis G. Hale and built between 1892 and 1894 as luxury apartment housing for the city’s wealthier residents. Electricity came standard at a time when it did not elsewhere. A central kitchen delivered meals to tenants on every floor. In 1900 the building converted to the Lorraine Hotel, and in 1948 the Reverend Major Jealous Divine, known as Father Divine, purchased it for $485,000 and gave it his name and his mission.

Under Father Divine’s ownership, the Divine Lorraine became the first hotel of its class in Philadelphia to be fully racially integrated, operating without segregation at a time when that standard was far from common in American hospitality. The building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2002. It closed in 1999 after the International Peace Mission sold the property, and for years it stood on North Broad as a beautiful, empty presence, the kind of building that stops you on the sidewalk and asks questions.

The restoration came in stages. Developer Eric Blumenfeld acquired the building in October 2012 and undertook a renovation backed by $31.5 million in funding, transforming it into residential apartments that reopened in 2017. The lobby, preserved and polished, still carries the proportions of a building that was built to signal that something serious was happening at this address. The Divine Lorraine’s return to life has been one of the defining stories of North Broad Street’s ongoing transformation, a corridor where historic grandeur and new construction now exist in genuine proximity, and where the sum of the investments is beginning to feel like something more than the individual parts.

Foundation Bar and What It Made of That History

The basement of the Divine Lorraine had a story of its own before it became Foundation Bar. During Prohibition, that underground space operated as an actual speakeasy, accessible through a hatch in the Broad Street pavement. The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on the bar as occupying that same footprint, brought back to life as a moody cocktail, beer, and wine destination with a professional recording studio spanning 700 square feet built into the room.

Foundation was the project of Robert Del Femine, a Philadelphia DJ and entrepreneur who helped found the Underground Concepts hospitality group, working alongside chef Natalie Maronski, whose kitchen credits include Volver and Amada. Philadelphia Magazine covered the original concept when it was announced in 2020, and the bar opened around 2021, delayed by the pandemic timing that reshaped every hospitality opening of that era. The strategic position near the Met Philadelphia, the grand former opera house restored as a concert venue on North Broad, made Foundation a natural gathering point for musicians, music lovers, and anyone looking for a room with something happening below street level.

The recording studio is not incidental. It signals that the bar is not simply a place to drink near a historic address. It is a space that takes seriously the idea that creative people need somewhere to land before and after the work, somewhere that does not require performance at all times. For the book club, it turned out to be exactly the right room. There is something fitting about a group of readers taking up residence in a speakeasy that became a recording studio: all three are places where people gather to pay close attention to something together.

A Club That Takes Its Reading Seriously, and Everything Else Too

Every Tuesday evening at 7:30, Harry Hayman and the members of the book club settle into Foundation Bar. The club’s card names the address, the day, the time. What it cannot capture is the particular quality of what happens when a group of people who have actually read the same book sit down in a good room with good drinks and start talking.

Harry Hayman has been direct about what the club is actually for: good people, interesting ideas, great conversation, good food, good drinks, and getting together in real life. The book is the organizing principle, the reason everyone arrives on the same night, but what the club is doing is something that sociologists have a name for and that most people would describe more plainly. It is a group of adults who have chosen to be in the same room, in person, on a regular basis, on purpose.

That might sound ordinary. In 2026, it is not. Research documented by CT Public found that book club event listings in the United States grew 24 percent between 2022 and 2023, a sign that the desire to gather around a shared text is not fading. The form is pulling in people who are looking for something durable and present. Book clubs, as it turns out, are one of the more reliable ways that strangers become the kind of people who check on each other when someone is sick, who remember what was said three weeks ago, who are simply there.

Third Places and Why They Are Not Optional

The sociologist Ray Oldenburg gave a name to what Foundation Bar is doing for this book club, and for anyone else who walks in on a Tuesday night. In his 1989 book The Great Good Place, Oldenburg described what he called third places: the social surroundings separate from home (the first place) and work (the second place) where people gather on informal, common ground. Taverns, coffeehouses, barbershops, community centers. Places where conversation is the main activity, where regulars feel a piece of themselves rooted in the room, and where a stranger who walks in is not an intruder but a potential regular.

Oldenburg’s argument was that third places are essential to democratic life and civic health, not a nice addition to a neighborhood but a structural requirement. He saw the erosion of these spaces as a direct contributor to the fragmentation of community life in American cities. The argument, when he made it in 1989, felt like a warning. By 2026, the data suggests it was accurate.

In May 2023, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy released a formal advisory documenting what he called an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. The advisory drew on evidence showing that approximately half of American adults report measurable loneliness, and that the health consequences extend well beyond mood: increased risk of cardiovascular disease, dementia, depression, and early mortality. Social isolation among older adults alone accounts for an estimated $6.7 billion in excess Medicare spending annually. These are not soft numbers. They are the arithmetic of what happens when people stop gathering, and when there are fewer good places to gather to begin with.

North Broad Street and the Argument Harry Hayman Is Making

Harry Hayman’s recommendation of Foundation Bar is not disconnected from the broader work he cares about. The North Broad Renaissance, the nonprofit managing the North Broad Business Improvement District from City Hall to Butler Street, has spent years making the case that this corridor deserves investment and attention. The district serves more than 50,000 residents across eight neighborhoods. Billy Penn and WHYY have both covered the development story in depth: the Met, the Divine Lorraine, new residential construction, Mural Arts installations, and a development plan built around transit near the North Philadelphia Amtrak and SEPTA stations. Visit Philadelphia has highlighted North Broad’s combination of art, culture, dining, and development as one of the city’s stories of the moment.

Harry Hayman’s version of that story is simpler and more direct than a development brief. He points to a room in a building that has been through a racially integrated hotel and a Prohibition speakeasy and a long vacancy and a full restoration, and he says: this is where the book club meets. Come for dinner. Come for drinks. Come to meet someone interesting. Come every night. Philadelphia has places where people can settle in and actually hang out, and the ones that do it well deserve to stay in business. Foundation Bar, in his estimation, is one of those places. A building with that long a memory deserves to have people in it on Tuesday nights, talking about books and everything else, and coming back the following Tuesday because the conversation was worth it.

The Divine Lorraine: A Building With a Long Memory

Foundation Bar and What It Made of That History

A Club That Takes Its Reading Seriously, and Everything Else Too

Third Places and Why They Are Not Optional

North Broad Street and the Argument Harry Hayman Is Making

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