The jukebox at Prohibition Taproom, and what a good corner bar is actually for

There is a red neon arrow on the corner of 13th and Buttonwood pointing down at a door, which is the most honest piece of signage in Philadelphia. Harry Hayman went through that door, and the thing he came out talking about was not the beer list. It was the jukebox.

What Harry Hayman found at 13th and Buttonwood

Prohibition Taproom sits at 501 North 13th Street, on the corner, in the stretch of Callowhill that has lately been rebranded as Spring Arts. The black painted wall on the Buttonwood side carries the house marks in white: PRO TAP, thirteenth street at Buttonwood, PHL, and the date the business gives itself, MMVIII. Underneath that, a painted circle asking for work, wine and beer, in that order.

Inside it is dim, wooden and low ceilinged. A long mahogany bar with a mirrored back, a chalkboard running the length of it listing the taps by number and price, another board with the night’s specials, and a third with the bar’s social media handles written out in chalk because somebody decided that was easier than a sign.

The bar’s own account describes a menu built daily around locally farmed ingredients, matched to the beers on the taps. There are thirteen of those plus one hand pulled line, which is a detail most bars do not bother with because cask is more work and sells less.

The house beer, and why it is named that

The hand pulled line in the photographs is labelled Hoppy Lil Hudson, an English style India pale ale brewed for the bar by Sterling Pig and available nowhere else.

The name is not a marketing exercise. It is the name of the owners’ daughter. Michael and Jeniphur Pasquarello run the place, and the exclusive house beer on the cask line is named after their child.

That is a small thing and it is the whole difference between a bar and a hospitality concept. A concept does not name the cask ale after anybody’s kid, because a concept does not have a family attached to it.

The jukebox

Harry Hayman photographed the jukebox, and his own reflection is in the display, which he did not crop out.

It is a digital machine in an old style cabinet, and the pages behind the glass are the interesting part. The Jam, In the City. The Smiths, The Queen Is Dead. Tom Waits, Small Change. Kraftwerk, Computer World.

That is not a shuffle playlist and it is not an algorithm. Somebody chose those. The Jam’s first record, the Smiths at their most quotable, Waits at his most gravel voiced and Kraftwerk at their most machine like, sitting in the same box in a corner bar in Philadelphia.

The jukebox as an object has been dying for thirty years, killed first by cheap sound systems and then by every phone being a music library. What survives in the places that keep one is the part a phone cannot do: a stranger picking something, and everyone in the room having to live with it for three minutes.

Why the room matters more than the drinks list

Philadelphia has plenty of bars with better beer lists than this one and plenty with more ambitious food. What is harder to find, and what this corner has, is a room that works on an ordinary night with nothing on.

The specials board in the photographs is handwritten and priced. The back bar is crowded rather than curated. There is a shelf near the back holding a growler with the bar’s name on it, a couple of bartending books, a pennant reading no beer, some small barrels and the framed state licences that every Pennsylvania bar has to display and most hide.

None of that is designed to be photographed. It accumulated. Harry Hayman’s argument about neighbourhood places, which he makes about restaurants as often as bars, is that accumulation is the thing you cannot buy or fake. A room that has been open long enough to collect stuff feels different from one that opened with the stuff already placed.

What a corner bar does for a block

The functional case is easy to underrate. A bar on a corner puts lit windows and moving people on a street between the hours when the offices empty and the street would otherwise be dark. It gives the block a reason to be walked through. It employs bartenders and cooks who mostly live nearby, and it buys from suppliers, some of them local, every week of the year.

In Callowhill specifically, which spent decades as a district of empty warehouses, that mattered before the neighbourhood had a name to market. The bar dates itself to 2008 on its own wall. Most of the development that gave the area its current label came afterwards.

That order of events is worth noticing. The bars and the restaurants tend to arrive before the district does, take the risk while rents are low and the streets are quiet, and are then described afterwards as beneficiaries of a transformation they largely started.

The part that took thirty years to build

A bar like this one is easy to describe and very difficult to start.

The obvious costs are the ones everybody knows about: the liquor licence, the build out, the kitchen equipment, the staff. The less obvious cost is time. A corner bar becomes a neighbourhood bar only after enough ordinary nights have happened in it that people stop deciding whether to go and simply go. That takes years, and there is no way to accelerate it with money or design.

Which is why the ones that survive are worth paying attention to as infrastructure rather than as leisure. Philadelphia loses bars and restaurants constantly, usually quietly, usually for reasons that have nothing to do with whether the place was any good: a lease ends, a landlord sells, a partner wants out, an insurance renewal lands wrong. Every one of those closures deletes a decade of accumulated ordinary nights that cannot be rebuilt somewhere else.

Harry Hayman has spent enough time around hospitality operators to be unsentimental about the economics. Margins are thin, labour is the biggest line, and the difference between a good year and a bad one is often a handful of slow weeks in February. None of that is visible from a bar stool, and all of it decides whether the bar is still there in five years.

So the useful response to a place like this is not admiration. It is attendance. Bars do not survive on being appreciated. They survive on covers.

The recommendation, plainly

Harry Hayman’s summary of the evening was short and did not need editing. Cool place, good conversation, good eats, and a jukebox worth feeding.

If you have not been, go. Sit at the bar rather than a table, order whatever is on the hand pull, and put something on that the room has to listen to.