In the business of bars, there is only one chance. One chance to pull the patron off the street, one chance to set them down at the bar, one chance to offer them an atmosphere and a drink that will bring them back.
Fitzgibbons (1127 N. Water St.) is no different.
I had been here several months before, pulled off a hop-scotch bar tour by a $1 tap beer sign. The experience Fitzgibbons offered that day wasn’t paltry, it was insufferable. The bar had a disregarded feeling, and the back patio was ripe with the scent of dead mouse, decomposing somewhere among the huge street signs and abandoned foosball table.
I headed to Fitzgibbons for a second shot, with every intention of writing a scathing review because I had already been there, and it had already failed in my eyes. I arrived at the door of Fitzgibbons with blood foaming at the end of my pen.
Here’s how it went:
I sat at the bar. It was dingy and dead and how I remembered it. Posted currency from around the world lined the wall behind the cash register. The bathroom still had the graffiti, “Toy Story 2 was OK,” penned in black marker above the urinal. One of the taps, “Beer,” still glared out against the others. The back area had paint cans and work gloves in plain view, cast down as if mid-project. One of the TVs had a black shadow running the middle, as if someone threw a mug of beer at it after an upsetting loss.
Dan Fitzgibbons, the owner, came over and took our order. He asked my girlfriend and I if we were there for the Bucks game and spoke lightly with a smile. We said no. He asked us what we did. We told him school and work. I asked him how business was.
“The recession has hit us all,” he said.
And it has. The bar was empty the first time I went there. It was mostly empty again, save for a few customers at the end.
We continued to talk about how he opened the bar 13 years ago and how he used to work in a slaughter house. He explained the décor of the place, and the fact that, even in his eyes, it’s a dive bar. And it really is quite a dive. But, with most dive bars come cheap drinks and a comfortable seat. Usually that’s not enough to redeem a place. Add to that Dan’s flavorful stories, the holiday decorations that must have taken some time to put up, and the attention to the customer, and it changes the equation.
Every bar can’t be given a second chance; it’s the nature of the beast. But I’ve realized something, meeting Dan Fitzgibbons, or Fitz, as his friends know him. Behind every drink served, every happy hour special and decrepit interior stands an owner, and someone who is probably pretty humble, and probably much like we are.
My revisit of Fitzgibbons was worth more than the cheap drinks and the night out. It’s changed my outlook on bars. And, in the very least, it’s added to the already prodigious repertoire of bars on Water Street.
I haven’t given up my stalwart convictions about bars and first impressions, how much they hold, or how far they go. But sometimes first impressions aren’t enough. Some bars deserve a second round. Maybe I’ll revisit all the establishments I’ve been to, if not for the drinks, then at least for the economy.
