Philadelphia mcglincheys

The wraparound bar. The only difference was you could see it all without a blanket of Camel fumes. One of the last smoking bars in Philadelphia, where a night out took two or three nights to wash off your skin, had officially gone non-smoking.

Not by choice, exactly. Sheldon Sokol, who owns the bar with his brother Ron, said business has been slow since the reopening. If he could bust out the ashtrays again, he would. The Sokols have owned the joint since their father, Henry, died in , and are ready for retirement.

Ron, 80, has a son who works behind the bar, and is the apparent heir. Most places are yuppified. The cash-only bar got an exemption from the citywide smoking ban because of its low food-sale revenue.

In early , just before the pandemic hit, Sokol said he was forced to give up his indoor smoking exemption due to a conflict with a health department inspector. The Pennsylvania Department of Health confirmed it did not make any changes to the Clean Indoor Air Act during the pandemic, and Philadelphia regulates its own indoor policies around tobacco.

Each one of the 10 windows facing 15th Street is topped with fancy brickwork and a keystone. The second floor windows each have an arch with medallions in between. Both doorways are embellished with intricate mini-porticos and the fine cornice up top really pulls it all together.

While Allen-Sherman-Hoff stayed in the building until moving to Wynnewood in the early s, they ceded the ground floor and second floor spaces to commercial use and consolidated themselves into the third floor around This may have had something to do with Lionel Friedman wanting to take advantage of the end of prohibition.

By that point, they also had offices in the building next door now Latimer Deli. Allen-Sherman-Hoff is still in business as the ash-handling subsidiary of Diamond Power International and is now based in Exton.

On October 1st, , the ground floor space received its first tenant: the Odd Book Shop. Little is known about this business beyond, probably, some odd books. They later changed their name to the Odd Shop and expanded their products to include porcelains, glass, prints, paintings, and decorations. His office now in the Lewis Tower today Aria Condo , and having developed and built most of the buildings on this stretch of 15th Street, Friedman pursued the greener pastures of suburban strip malls and sold South 15th Street.

Friedman would grow his company even further and become a philanthropist focused on Jewish causes: he organized the Philadelphia chapter of the American Council for Judaism, was President of the Board of Trustees of both Rodeph Shalom Synagogue and the Jewish Seaside Home for Invalids, Vice-President of the Jewish Publication Society of America, and was a founding member of what is now called the Jewish Employment and Vocational Service.

His real estate company, through a series of mergers and acquisitions, still lives on as the Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust whose offices are a block away on Broad Street. The new owner, a Mr. However, by the s, the bar we all know and love was definitely inhabiting the first floor space while Mr. McGlinchey and his family resided on the second and third floor, which they had converted into an apartment.

The McGlincheys lived up there until , when one Henry Sokol purchased both the building and the establishment. His descendants still own the building and manage the bar to this day. I thought the building was a lot older than that! He explained to me how contractors working in the basement of the building had told him that the beams and other structural features of the basement had to pre-date the Civil War.

Could Lionel Friedman have re-used the foundation of the circa s rowhouses that once stood here? Sokol also went on to explain how some parts of the building still carry clues toward its history. He thinks they may have been used by an old laundry service.

It became a disco in the late 70s and moved on to hosting live music acts in the s. Why is it there? Employees may not want to spend their shifts sucking in toxic fumes. After all, they already threw out all their ashtrays, according to owner Sheldon Sokol. The dive landmark could set an example for every other bar in the city that currently allows smoking. He is also a former member of the editorial board of the Philadelphia Daily News. Skip to content Share Icon.

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