.

McGlinchey's. I entered this bar for the first time in 1982, when I was 18. To make myself look older, I wore a thrift store jacket, bought for $2. Back then, a draft of Rolling Rock was 50 cents, and a hotdog was 25 cents. It was, and still is, the cheapest bar in Center City. When I drank here almost daily from 1988 until 1999, there was only one TV. Now there are four, and a hotdog is 75 cents.

In 1996, I wrote a monologue for WHYY, a local television station, and it was performed by an excellent actor, Tom McCarthy, inside McGlinchey's, and "555," a story in my book, Fake House, begins in McGlinchey's before moving to a Chinatown whorehouse.



.