“I Closed Wolski's”

Chasing shots at one of Milwaukee's oldest bars

Jake Naughton

MILWAUKEE — The first time I went to Wolski’s Tavern, it felt inevitable.Hitting the iconic Milwaukee bar at the end of a bar crawl is something of a rite of passage in a city drowning in places to drink, and I felt the time had come to jump on the bandwagon.I went to high school in the city, and college an hour away, but it took until I’d decamped to the East Coast and was back on a visit for me to finally make the trek.

In the firmament of Milwaukee’s many iconic bars, Wolski’s exists somewhere beyond legend. When Esquire named Milwaukee the bar city of the year a few years back, Wolski’s was listed among the handful that defined the city’s drinking scene.For those doubting Esquire’s provenance over the midwest, my mom, a native Milwaukeean, vouches for the bar as well, and for good reason. More than 100 years old and still run by the great-grandsons of the founder, Bernard Wolski, the tavern is the prototypical American corner bar.Think steel-tipped darts, wood paneling and a long weathered bar with a bartender that makes you feel at home. The drinks are cheap, the popcorn is just the right amount of salty and the company is neighborly.

A generation ago, bars just like Wolski’s dominated Milwaukee’s drinking scene: family-owned, humble little joints scattered around the city. Walk through any neighborhood and you’d find them on the corner or even mid-block, surrounded by houses.Bernard Wolski used to live above the bar with his family. Nowadays, with a younger scene dominated by bigger, splashier bars in well-defined hubs, family-owned joints are becoming an endangered species. But Wolski’s has endured, attracting both the lifers that give the place its charm, and the weekend flood of young ones that keep the doors open.

During the day, gauzy sunlight streams into the well-worn space. Longtime regulars, some who’ve been coming since the 60’s, sit at the bar and talk with Dennis Bondar, one of the two great-grandsons that own and operate the place. At 3:30 sharp, Bondar breaks out the ivories for his standing game of bar dice, a Milwaukee classic. He and Jeff Beutner, a regular since 1978, take turns slamming the cup full of dice onto the bar. Afterwards, they have a shot — loser buys the round.

Sometime in the 1970s, longtime regulars (pre-dating Beutner) complained they weren’t getting any recognition for the long hours they were logging at the bar, so the owners started making bumper stickers that read, "I CLOSED WOLSKI’S."Since then, the world took notice, and now they hand out upwards of 20,000 each year. The stickers have been spotted around the globe, from safari trucks in Tanzania, to a restaurant in Istanbul, to the window of an abandoned storefront in a ghost town in Arizona.

Wolski’s is marooned at the end of a long and twisting one-way street a few minute’s walk from Brady Street, a major nightlife corridor. Come nighttime, the bar lights call out down the darkened street like a siren to the weary revelers who make the pilgrimage.At closing time on weekend nights, the crowd of folks who make it to the end of the night line up at the door to receive their prize: a bumper sticker. I grabbed one, too.