Old City back in 2005. Photo by Michael Cramer

At 5pm, a line of bartenders stand behind the soon-to-be crowded bar at The Plough & The Stars. One sneaks his nail under a RedBull tab; it hisses open and starts a line symphony of popped cans as each bartender jolts their head back in quick, instinctive habit to down the taurine-and-glucose fuel that will propel them through the busy night into 2am. Synchronized fueling. By midnight, there is a police-guarded crowd packed in front of 123 Chestnut Street; inside, the downstairs bar looks like the floor of the stock exchange in October of 1929. The cash register that year would take in enough to support every staff member and then some. It was 2004.

Photo courtesy of Tyler R. Westnedge

Today The Plough & The Stars is lucky to take in a fourth of that, and the career bartenders that used to leave each other $100 tips on their off nights, now can’t afford to support themselves, nevermind their bartending friends. “Brasil’s and Heat changed the demographic,” an anonymous Plough bartender tells us over a martini at Continental’s outdoor tables. It’s a Thursday night and even though its a cool 76 degrees, Second Street still looks lame. “With that changed demographic came more crime, then Blue Martini and Swanky Bubbles all of a sudden were in headlines.” But she isn’t blaming the degeneration of Old City on just salsa nightclubs; her main fury is with me, the journalist.

“The media started bashing the crowds down here and that bad PR from the inside changed everything irrevocably,” she sighs. The words douchey, frat and stripper started appearing in articles and blogs about the neighborhood, and even Philadelphia Inquirer Inga Saffron got in on the bashing (“I didn’t want people vomiting and doing coke on my doorstep.”) Those bad feelings being whispered around the city, coupled with a new “hip” Northern Liberties a few blocks north, meant the decline in bar patrons for places that relied on their 5 – 10pm crowd. “The neighborhood people are the ones we miss,” she says of the Northern Liberties wave. “Our 10pm – 2am crowd is still the same, it’s that after-work crowd that left. They all scattered north.”

An empty Old City street

A city bashing its own neighborhoods is really unheard of; no NYC magazine or newspaper I know has even wrote about Harlem in a negative light. The purpose of your city media outlets is to encourage the growth of these neighborhoods, spotlight the positive about the city. Old City bars like The Plough have lost 70 percent of their business and we are all responsible. With the opening of Revolution House, more members part of the Old City Creative Corridor, Dolce and Paradigm under new ownershipnew residential condos on Market and a massive hotel and country bar trying to elbow its way onto Race Street, we can see people slowly moving on from the bad Old City press and back into a neighborhood to be proud of.

And while we certainly have no interest in the ilk of people falling out of Rotten Ralphs, we will refrain from taking the easy way out of “journalism” by criticizing everything rather than taking the risk of standing by something. In this case, that would be supporting the career bartenders and respectable watering holes of Continental, The Plough and Triumph; we can turn a blind eye to anything immature happening across the street, but we can’t to the accusations that my industry may have had a hand in driving people away from a neighborhood we once loved. —Caitlin Connors