7

I live on Pauline St. in the Bywater neighborhood of New Orleans. I ride my bike a lot. If I ride two blocks down Pauline St., toward the Mississippi River, to Royal St., turn right and go another six blocks I'll find myself at Markey's. I guess in the end it's just a neighborhood bar, but Markey's has impressed me as being a much more. I go there a whole lot. Sometimes maybe too much. In fact I want to go right now. Later. It is probably the coolest bar I've ever been too or frequented. And not because it tries to be, just kind of an unassuming place. When I have to go back to Lexington, I wish i could take Markey's with me. There's a whole lot of reasons why, i.e. free pool and the shuffle board. Cheap beer (two dollar high lifes). The Saints games are really fun to go to, even if the Saints aren't doing well. All kinds of people from the neighborhood come out and boo or cheer or curse, but it's all together. I don't suppose that's too different from any other neighborhood sports-ish type bar. More reasons: People are always playing good music on the jukebox. One night I was in there and the jukebox started with some Hank Williams went on to some Johnny Cash then to the Misfits (I think) and ended up with some ODB. Maybe that's called an eclectic mix, I call it good taste. Markey's is a tiny tiny place, kind of a hole in the wall, but has five or six brand new flat screen televisions, thirty six inch televisions. I was pretty shocked by that the first time I went there, seemed almost like an oxymoron. Those tv's make the Saints games more fun to watch. Plus Markey's has a reasonably priced kitchen. It's pretty good too. This is what going to Markey's feels like: "more like you've stopped at a friend's house for a few drinks and good conversation rather than a night out on the town (1)." That's really corny.

Over my few months of being a semi-New Orleanian, the strongest appeal of Markey's to me is and has been the Cheer's factor. Sometimes you really do want to go where everybody knows your name. Most people in Markey's at any given time seem to know, or at least recognize, most other people. The bar's demographic itself seems to be primarily transplants, much like I am, but less like me in the sense that, while I'll be leaving mid-December, they have started lives down here in New Orleans, specifically in the Bywater. Markey's by it's nature, by definition, fosters a sense of community in the neighborhood. People congregate there, frequent there, meet there, a sort of networking place--not corporate networking but neighborly networking. I feel like this fact is especially important for transplants. Markey's provides a place to be for the neighborhood, almost as a confirmation of residency. It's comfortable. If you're known at Markey's you're part of the neighborhood. Native New Orleanians already have that state of residency and being established have less need for a place like Markey's to latch on to. (This is not to say that there are no natives there or that natives don't need a place to congregate) Transplants do not. Native residents have legitimacy in New Orleans. Markey's provides a degree of legitimacy to people who are transplants. The legitimization of transplants is an active side effect of the Cheer's factor. The Cheer's factor makes you feel like more of a New Orleanian. I don't know if people realize this, or even if its true for transplants in general, but this has been the case for me. And it seems like its been the case for most people.

Frequenting Markey's, and the diversity of people in the neighborhood (mainly due to origin and/or occupation) means I've met a whole lot of different people there. I've met the bartenders. I don't guess I could speculate as to whether or not they know me seems like most of them do. I kind of had a crush on one of them when I first got down here to New Orleans. Her name is Lisa, but I'm pretty sure she's got a boyfriend. One of the guys I've seen there a couple of times calls me Kentucky. I don't think he remembers my name; actually I think he sporadically remembers my name. I didn't know his name for a while either so it doesn't really matter. It's Tom. But I do know I like being referred to as Kentucky, very much so. What is interesting about all of this though is the fact that after you become established, i.e. a regular, people readily accept you and talk to you about anything, from where they are from to the nature of exploding trash piles to the regularity of their sexual life. I figured out that the biggest factor in you being considered a regular is recognition by the bartenders. If they know your name or are familiar with you, you win. Immediately other people also recognize you as being a regular. This seems almost synonymous with being considered, or at least part of becoming, an equal member of the neighborhood.

At Markey's most people have a distinct readiness to engage in conversation. “But the greatest love - the love above all loves, Even greater than that of a mother - Is the tender, passionate, undying love, Of one beer drunken slob for another (2)”--Irish proverb, true. Which is why my methodology can be very simple. It's nothing crazy or new but it works. The key is frequency or maybe consistency, and beer. Each time I go, I walk in to Markey's, sit down at the closest available seat, wait for whoever is bartending and order a Miller High Life draft. Three bucks on the counter and wait. Without fail by the end of that beer a conversation will have started between me and the person/people next to me. People are very talkative and friendly there. I could say people do that to reach out. But I don't think that is actually why. It's a neighborhood bar. People are trying to be neighbors. If people see you around they begin to feel like you are a neighbor as opposed to an outsider. As I said earlier, if people there recognize you, i.e. the bartenders, everyone else will recognize you. For example tonight I met a man named John. I sat down and he saw Lisa, the bartender, wave at me. I assumed that he assumed I was a neighborhood person, and a regular at Markey's (which was further validated when Chris, a contractor in the neighborhood, and Tom, "Detroit", sat down and talked to us, recognizing me, and both coming to Markey's fairly regularly).

John and I started talking about the game, Navy vs. Pitt. It was a predominately offensive game, that was an icebreaker. After a beer or two more, we began a legitimate conversation. Most conversations in that bar begin with where you're from. He told me, "I'm a Steelers fan too, so I"m glad Pitt. is runnin this offense right now." So I asked him if he was from Pittsburgh. "Na man I'm from New York, not the city but a little bit outside." His wife is from Pittsburgh, now he's down here with his wife running a small bed and breakfast on Poland. After the conversation became comfortable, familiar, I tried to pull Markey's itself into the equation. That was the point of me going there in the first place. We started to talk about the neighborhood, i.e. how people "hide their wealth, so other people don't know." "Man I'm a carpenter by trade. And you'll see these houses that look like shit. But when you go inside they're beautiful. I work in the neighborhood. I'm not trying to get rich. People know me and I know they'll pay me." I said that that was the way Markey's seems to me. It's all a matter of neighborly courtesy and friendliness. One thing he said specifically about Markey's was that it's the same way as those houses. What they are inside is different from how they appear outside (especially before Markey's got that nice red paint job).

I guess what I've come to realize talking to him and others, the stories themselves being fantastic byproducts, is that Markey's and neighborhood bars in general act as a neighborhood forum. They provide an essential function for the sense of overall community. John said "New Orleans is a neighborhood place. Bywater is relaxed place. Shit happens here like it does anywhere in the city but people kinda tend to look out for people here." The neighborhood bar is a place for people in the neighborhood to congregate in a "relaxed" setting and create neighborly bonds which leads to people looking out for each other. He told me that when he and his wife first moved down here "you know, our neighbors came over with a bottle of champagne. They gave us that as a gift and then invited us over for dinner. And, you know, this is before the hurricane. They thanked us for being on the street and trying to keep this bed and breakfast going, even though there's no breakfast anymore."

When I tried to research neighborhood bars in general, I found that research focused predominately on "problem drinking". They're researchers so I suppose they know better than I do. "After accounting for one's education level, income, race, and neighborhood sociodemographic characteristics, we found that a higher number of minor-restricted establishments located within one mile from someone's home is associated with that person's higher likelihood of consuming excess alcohol (3)." I guess all that research says is that I'm more likely to stop and have a beer near my house than across town, and so close I don't have to drive to get there so I might go more frequently.

As an aside, this guy Dave, who I see there fairly regularly, told me a story about his ex-wife who threw a bag of trash on a bonfire they were having back in NC. The trash exploded. It caught one of his friends on fire and scratched up a brand new Grand Am really bad. You can't make that up, good story. There was more to it than that but I can't really remember it.

I got to the bar around 8:50 a.m. on Tuesday the sixth. Roy, Markey's owner, came over from his house which is directly across the street, rather convenient for him. I can't say I'm not jealous of Roy's set up: running a nice small bar, house across the street, decent patrons who don't mess with his house. Roy wins. I was outside smoking a cigarette, overcast, when he walked over with his binder in hand. Roy kind of walks with a lean. We sat down at the far end of the bar and began the interview, my 9 a.m. beer in hand. Thank goodness for tape recorders. Bar's have a completely different presence in the morning with no one there and the lights on, chairs up, quiet. I guess that's an obvious statement.

I started off by asking him about the history of the bar.
"At the turn of the century it was a transient bar. And at one point in time Standard Brewing Company owned it. Then my Great Uncle Joe bought it. In regards to Mickey (Markey), Mickey died when he was forty, my Dad's older brother. All of them worked here at one point in time or another."
"So it's been in the family since '47?"
"Since '47, yeah."
"When did you come into it."
"I started working here in ah probably '73 in high school. I came here to work in the summertime. Of course I looked older. I was able to tend bar in the day time and stuff like that. But uh, in '75 I graduated from highschool. I was here pretty much full time after that. Then my dad retired in '91 and that's when I actually took over in '92."
"The paper I'm writing is about the role of Markey's in the neighborhood."
"It's changed so much over the years. When I first came to work here, we used to open at six in the morning and close at ten at night. It was predominately men, riverfront employees essentially, longshoremen, clerks, seamen. LIke I said predominately all men, daytime and afternoon. We used to close at ten. Six a.m. buddy they were here. We also had a lot of seamen. The place next door which is the Country Club now, used to be a boarding house. Had a lot of Spanish people come back then too, from Honduras. They used to work the standard fruit, banana fruit. They used to have banana wharfs out here. And a lot of them, you know, would stay there. And my Uncle would help them send money back home to them. A lot of them didn't speak English. Things of that nature. You know, a lot of mix, but predominately all riverfront related. And then uh, trying to think of what year it was, late '70's I would say, is when they pretty much shut most of the wharfs down and moved everything uptown. And that was also, too, the result of containerized cargo. Once they containerized everything these wharfs were too narrow for containerized cargo. So we pretty much had to reinvent ourselves, so to speak. I mean we still had some of that business. But it was no where like what it was. So, so I started working at night. First we started staying open until midnight. As time went on, you know, it just gradually became more of a neighborhood bar rather than a riverfront bar. So I mean. For years my dad insisted on opening at six a.m., a creature of habit, that sort of thing you know. But eventually we started opening a little later as he got a little older. First we went to eight o'clock, then ten o'clock and at one point we actually started opening up in the afternoon."
"'Cause not enough people coming in?"
"Well also too, things changed. Even back [some] road, people that were working there couldn't drink, 'cause if you got in any sort of accident the first thing they'd do, used to call it the spit box like they did the horses. If you get in an accident you gotta pee, and if you're intoxicated you could lose your job and what have you. So whatever really activity we had in the area as far as work oriented, working people here during the day time, just wouldn't change the way things were done. People just couldn't drink in the daylight like you used to anymore. So we went to mid afternoon. That's when we really, truly became more of a neighborhood bar, over that course of time."
At this point we move to a table next to the pool table, our spot was about to get the Tuesday morning mop.
"I know ya'll have recently put in some cameras and flat screen tv's and other things, would that be in the same line as becoming a neighborhood bar, kind of keeping up with that move?"
"Well yeah, you know, this whole process started a long time ago. I mean you know, Christ, before we had cable tv we had one television in the bar. And then when we got cable in the '80's, I mean, it's just something that sports, to a degree that bars, you know, it just wasn't there. Sports on tv then was an occasional horse race on the weekend, football games of course, and Friday night fights and stuff like that, whatever the network was showing. When cable got here, everybody became a Cubs fan because we got WGN. Stuff like that. So then you know, you start adding tvs, add one here and add one there. Then with the advent of technology and everything, with the programming being what it is. I did the satellite thing in the mid-'80s. I remember the fact that I got the first dish. It was a real big one. Every bar from the lower Esplanade came trying to find out where I got my dish from. Gradually branched out from there. And then last year with the Saints doing well and all after Katrina. And everybody was all pumped up. So I went in and got the LCD tvs, in the latter part, well at little past halfway through the season. And it really made a huge difference. People came in and watched Saints games. You could almost say it's a sports bar in that way, but I don't look at it like that. Some think it's an Irish pub, but I don't look at it that way either. It's a neighborhood bar to me, that's all I've ever tried to make it."
"I come here pretty often and I've notice that a lot of the people I meet aren't from New Orleans."
"And you're correct. I'd be venturing at a guess here, but I'd be willing to say that probably, they all live here of course; I'd be willing to bet that probably 70% of the clientele I have right now are transplants from other places. And I think a lot of that's to do with the neighborhood...Prior to Katrina the Bywater was a very affordable place. Close to the French Quater. I equate to Soho in New York before it went yuppee. The crowd's gotten so diverse, with so many new faces since Katrina, but primarily you're right. Most people are not indigenous to New Orleans."
"Could you venture a guess as to why a lot of the people who aren't from New Orleans come to this bar."
"Well, I don't know. I think we're fairly reasonable price wise...shuffle board, until recently a free pool table, like I said the sports programming is available. A lot of changes, we went to an internet juke box. And prior to that we had a regular cd box and I controlled most of the stuff that was on there, not that I did it, the bartenders and customers had input. This internet thing is new. It offers you so much more variety, that's why I went to it. So many different tastes out there. I credit my employees immensely for that. I've got a real good staff of bartenders. They do a really good job. And I think when people come in, it doesn't take long for them to feel rather comfortable. As opposed to sometimes at other places you don't get that. And once again I think the staff have a lot to do with that as well. Also too, I kind of pride myself, there's no gimmicks. I'm not a gimmicky person. I think that that laid back approach helps. I just don't like the pressure. You come in and you make of it what you want. You play shuffle board, you play pool, watch sports, throw some darts. Everybody's got they're own niche."

I've noticed that comfort factor. What the interview showed me is the evolution of Markey's. Over time Markey's has adapted to the needs of it's environment, i.e. from primarily wharf workers and seamen to the neighborhood residents in the Bywater right now. Seems like the goal of Markey's, and I think successfully accomplished, is offering a comfortable place for people in the neighborhood to go kick back, take a load off, which I think I'm going to do here in about five minutes. I don't exactly know how to describe it, but as an illustration: a couple of Mondays ago I went to Markey's to play some pool with my roommate Bob and a couple other kids from class. When we got in the bar it was about midnight; there were three people and the bartender. I got a beer and we started playing pool. A little bit later Bob said to me "Man, if this were any other bar this would be awkward as hell." He's right. Markey's is just comfortable.

I tried to research Markey's. There's not a whole lot written on it that I've found. I did find this: "These days the only thing Irish about Markey’s is the Pogues on the jukebox...Today it’s a mix of young hip service industry workers from the neighborhood and carpenters in sleeveless t-shirts, their girlfriends in feathered hair and sweat pants with their brastraps showing. It’s not as flashy as Mimi’s, not as underground cool as the Saturn, not as definitively ninth ward, or as depressing, as BJ’s or Vaughns (4)." And those are all reasons why I like it.


1. Lawrence, Julie. "Circa Succeeds as Cozy Neighborhood Bar." Milwaukee's Daily Magazine. Nov. 27, 2007. http://www.onmilwaukee.com/bars/ articles/circabar.html

2. Irish Proverb, http://thinkexist.com/quotes/with/keyword/beer

3. Vieira, Carol. "Heavy Drinking Associated With Local Bars But Not Liquor Stores." Nov. 15, 2007. http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/ 88857.php

4. Christian. "Markey's Bar" Dirty South Bureau. (blog). July 24, 2006. http://roselund.com/2006/07/24/markeys-bar