Joe Sixpack: Ode to McGillin's - our city's oldest bar

AS IN ANY decent bar, you tend to lose track of time at McGillin's Old Ale House.

A bartender's shift ends, another's begins; one St. Patrick's Day leads to the next; the sun sets, but the neon sign outside glows. The baked potatoes, the karaoke songs, the pitchers of beer, the ceremonial clang of a bell behind the bar, the scrape of a barstool against the tile floor - they blend together in a seamless, happy moment.

Then you look over your shoulder and notice a century and a half has gone by.

There is no older bar in Philadelphia. Known originally as the Bell in Hand, McGillin's has operated in its same location on tiny Drury Street in Center City since 1860, more than a decade before they built City Hall.

On Tuesday, the joint will begin a 150-day countdown to its sesquicentennial by unveiling a new house ale brewed for the occasion by Stoudt's.

The saloon's longevity is remarkable by any measure.

It is older than the city's Cavanaugh's, Dante & Luigi's and Snockey's. It outlasted Palumbo's and the Middle East and Strolli's. Only a few businesses of any kind are older, including the Inquirer (1829) and Samuel Freeman Auctioneers (1805).

What's more notable is the names of Philadelphia institutions that have come and gone in the ale house's lifetime: Wanamaker's, Fidelity Bank, Schmidt's, Scott Paper, Philco, the Athletics. When Strawbridge & Clothier (founded 1868) closed in 2005, the sales clerks held the wake at McGillin's.

You look through the bottom of your mug, and there he is: the foggy image of founder William McGillin, an Irish immigrant with 13 children whom everyone called "Pa." He raised them upstairs; downstairs, he tended to the wooden casks.

"The cellar - with their rows of vats and hogsheads of ale, new, old, medium, light, dark, quick-use, stock India pale, Burton, brown stout and all that - were the pride of Mr. McGillin's good old heart," said his obituary in 1901. "He fairly reveled and gloated in them and prided himself on their neatness and the quality of the brew."

You check for loose change. A glass cost a nickel.

When he died, Catherine "Ma" McGillin took his place, staying open through the Prohibition by serving hot lunches with free baked potatoes. Each November, crowds filled Drury Street and serenaded her with "Happy Birthday." When she died in 1937 at age 90, her funeral at Oliver H. Bair's was so big, they shut down Chestnut Street.