may it never be last call at O'Connell's
Life keeps getting in the way of actual cooking and baking (and even actual eating, on a couple occasions this week). I’ve been in St. Louis, and at some point early in the week I broke up with my mom’s oven and scuttled the rest of my baking plans. A massive sweet potato — intended for these biscuits — is languishing on the counter, and the cake in the fridge is underdone, if still mostly edible.
So instead of a recipe or a deep dive into a particular food, this week I’m delivering another essay.
Steve the bartender was wearing a navy blue polo shirt printed with a pattern of Cardinals logos, and the TV in the corner was beaming the matinee game. I’m not sure I’d ever been in O’Connell’s Pub in the daytime before that hazy, hot afternoon, when the sun was tucked away under a blanket of clouds and all of St. Louis seemed to glow from the gray-beige glare.
Blink. Blink again. Your eyes will adjust. You’ll see the baseball on TV, and then you’ll make out an older couple waiting for a table and a trio of whiskered regulars at the front corner of the bar. Blink another time. You’ll see Steve, and you’ll see the little birds on little bats on his shirt, and he’ll wave you over and introduce himself and tell you the bar’s open seating, no need to wait for the hostess, wherever she’s gotten off to.
Your eyes have adjusted by now, and maybe you’ve forgotten the hundred annoyances that slithered behind you all the way here and tried to slide through the door before it slammed. Maybe you’ve even forgotten it’s 2023, because it might as well be 1990 in here, or 1972. That’s when O’Connell’s set up shop in this red brick building with an antique store on top, over the bridge and just past the highway. Keep an eye out, or you’ll drive right past.
But the pub’s story starts even longer ago, in 1959, when 17 tornados popped up across St. Louis overnight as Feb. 9 turned to Feb. 10. The worst of them ripped a 23-mile gash that crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois. It was especially bad along a bohemian stretch of Olive Street just past Boyle Avenue, known as Greenwich Corners. Businesses and homes were damaged. Some closed. But as insurance checks cleared, a few St. Louisans saw an opportunity, a block that was suddenly a blank slate. One bar opened, then another. A cabaret. New shops.
Then the gas company installed 121 streetlights along the sidewalk, and the bustling entertainment district got a name: Gaslight Square. Miles Davis was a regular at the jazz clubs. Barbara Streisand sang. Lenny Bruce left listeners doubled over with laughter. Beat poets recited their stories. In 1962, O’Connell’s opened its first location there.
In the photos of Gaslight Square in its heyday, tuxedoed waiters move wrought-iron chairs on wide patios. Women in strapless floral dresses clutch their husbands’ hands. Men in skinny ties wait with their big-haired dates outside nightclubs. Even in grainy black-and-white, you can sense the streetlights flickering.
Now, most of those streetlights serve as hokey decor at the Six Flags 45 minutes down the road. None remain along Olive Street. By the mid-1960s, white flight had taken hold in St. Louis. The suburbs stole the glamor and had no use for it. Barbara Streisand made it big. Lenny Bruce died. Miles Davis may have stopped coming home so often. Crime picked up, and Gaslight Square shut down. O’Connell’s was the last bar to leave. It outlasted the lights.
According to O’Connell’s website, when it relocate to Shaw Avenue in 1972, its owner brought “everything from the original wooden bar to the 1904 World's Fair chandeliers to the chairs, booths and kitchen equipment.” There it’s sat ever since. A decade ago, the city needed to redo and reroute the roads around O’Connell’s; they were in desperate need to updates and, someone decided, in slightly the wrong place. So they shut everything down and bent the road around the bar, never daring to disturb it.
St. Louis hasn’t always done progress well. Growing up here, you learn about what a mighty place it once was, the eighth-biggest city in the country in 1950. You hear stories about big riverboats and bigger tanks of fermenting hops. It sounds like it was all so colorful. Carlos Santana dated my mom’s neighbor and played music from their front porch. You could walk into a club, and you might find Tina Turner hitting notes only she could hit.
I know these stories, these facts, to be true. But I can’t imagine this old St. Louis, can’t hear it or smell it or even sense its ghost. All that’s left of Gaslight Square is a plaque. Over the years after everyone left everything behind, it descended into disrepair and stayed that way so long that no one ever thought about repairing it. Now, there’s a row of nondescript, identical houses and an apartment building. It seems impossible that this was once that. How could anyone have ever worn lipstick or played a trombone on this little patch of earth?
And that’s why O’Connell’s stands out — because of what it was and still is and may forever be. The menu hasn’t changed in years, but the soups change daily. At lunch on that hazy-hot day, a woman walked in looking for her purse. She’d left it somewhere, she explained, and she’d been in for a bite earlier. The bartender told her to check her booth, and if it wasn’t there, then this couldn’t have been where she left it. No one who eats at O’Connell’s would walk out with someone else’s things.
I ordered the same meal I always ordered: a cheeseburger with cheddar and a basket of fries. “Lettuce? Onion? Pickles?” Steve the bartender asked. Then my husband ordered a chicken sandwich and asked for tomato, and Steve explained the golden rule of O’Connell’s: There are no tomatoes. Tomatoes are bad nine months of the year, Steve said, and a restaurant can’t serve tomatoes seasonally. Customers will get confused, or upset. So instead of serving those insipid, pink-fleshed, watery January fruits, O’Connell’s serves no tomatoes at all, ever.
At this point in the story, Steve leaned conspiratorially toward us, bellying up to the other side of the bar. Some regulars, he explained, do bring in tomatoes from their gardens in the summer months. They take their knives and slice them at the table, laying them onto their steaming burgers. It’s a do-it-yourself business, with no implicating of the O’Connell’s staff.
We need more bars like O’Connell’s — bars that cities will bend roads around, bars that are offended by bad tomatoes, bars with regulars who have gardens and gumption. Bars that will pick up the party, piece by piece, and set it down again somewhere new rather than flicker the lights for a last last call — even if I wish the party had never been forced to move in the first place. Even if I often feel like the stories are better than anything I’ll ever see.
So nostalgic 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻