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Vintage Lancaster: P.J. Bar
09.22.09 // Posted in Food & Drink, Lancaster, We Care
Time meanders through this town at it own stubborn pace. Nowhere is this more true than at P.J. Bar (240 West King Street), a glorious time capsule of a tavern that is probably downtown’s oldest and most overlooked drinking establishment. Pete is the owner, lone bartender, and acid-tongued wit who inherited the place in 1980 from his father, who operated it as Johnny’s Tavern since the 1950s. As Pete freely admits, things haven’t changed much since then. Except for the small t.v. and the erratically updated jukebox (Hank Williams, Aaron Neville, Avril Lavigne, Shakira, and a whole column of unidentified “Greek Music”), you’d be hard-pressed to prove that you’re in the twenty-first century as you down your $1.05 glass of PBR amongst a motley smattering of regulars who mutter things like “Whenever it rains, my body starts telling me the story of my life.” Endearingly odd landscape scenes line the side wall, painted in 1953 by an itinerant muralist for thirty-five dollars and all he could drink. According to Pete, the guy took two hours to finish all three. I haven’t asked him about the deer heads and porcelain clowns along the other wall yet.
5 Comments so far
5 Responses to “Vintage Lancaster: P.J. Bar”
8:25 am on September 22nd, 2009
Ha, yes. I was in there with a friend a couple of years ago. We walked in and Pete had his head down on a table in the back sleeping. The TV was playing the Terminator movie I think on TBS or something. Super nice guy. Oh, and at that time the toilet paper was hanging from the bathroom ceiling by a chain that the Junkyard Dog would envious of.
8:39 am on September 22nd, 2009
[...] P.J. Bar: The B-Sides We Are Lancaster just posted a photo essay I took in downtown Lancaster’s P.J. Bar, and a few shots were left over. So here are some bonus tracks. Please check out the main gallery here. [...]
9:18 am on September 22nd, 2009
Yep, that’s the place. I posted a few outtakes (including a bathroom shot) at http://oldweirdlancaster.wordpress.com.
10:55 pm on September 22nd, 2009
That’s a great shot. The chain in my memory is way bigger I guess because of my surprise. I guess there were many rolls Jesse James’d for that chain to be installed.
10:20 pm on January 25th, 2010
[...] place and share about it. We Are Lancaster has been great at this, as in Ben Leech’s piece on P.J. Bar. Many times when a new place is profiled, commenters share that they’ve been wanting to check [...]