A titan lies tucked mere blocks away from the collegiate bluster of Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s premier party district. Behind an unassuming house-like façade on a residential street, one of the city’s oldest bars has served beer and cheer to the East Side for generations. Wolski’s Tavern is a century-and-change-old institution whose prominence in Milwaukee lore has been cemented in three words: “I Closed Wolski’s.”
A no-frills symbol of Cream City culture, Wolski’s iconic bumper sticker, with its bolded blue font on a white background, is probably the first thing most people know about the bar. A reward for dedicated drinkers, the sticker has ridden bumpers from Dublin to Osaka, plastered dive bar bathrooms and served as an objective for night-long quests to the bottom of beer glasses since 1973.
To folks like April Lynch, a regular both at the bar and its annual camping trip reserved for staff and only the most devout regulars, “It’s not just the bumper sticker and the hype—I haven’t closed Wolski’s in 15 or 20 years!” She used to live just two houses down Pulaski Street from the bar, but moved to Glendale, a Milwaukee suburb, a few years ago. “It’s still my home,” she says.
Veteran bartenders have been slinging shots of Stoli Orange to a tight-knit community of regulars at Wolski’s since I (24) was in diapers. Every night, barflies pan for gold at the pull-tab machines to a cacophony of rattle-rattle-thudding bar dice and the drone of chatter punctuated by laughs.
Old wooden pillars support a ceiling studded with Tiffany lamps and lined with flags; some for sailing, but most representing the heritage of folks who’ve knocked back Schlitz, Pabst and Miller at the bar. A weathered Polish flag dangles above the men’s room door in homage to the neighborhood’s history. If you step in, you’ll notice a sign asking people who use the restroom to wash their hands, but there’s no apparent sink inside: a test. (Thankfully, there is a sink in the corner, just conspicuous enough for anyone looking to find it. The bartender might even congratulate you for complying.)
Sitting at the bar feels just right; so does standing up. The old, rounded wood edges and surprisingly pristine brass rail jutting out are perfect for leaning over as you take shots or shoot dice with your bartender. It’s flattered by a dim crimson glow, broken only by the shine of a popcorn machine and the video slots bookending the space. Dozens of the usual suspects line the old-school backbar, with a few extra bottles of brandy thrown in—it is Wisconsin, after all. But aside from a stray Bloody Mary, Milwaukee’s unofficial cocktail, it’s a beer-and-shots crowd.
Normally I’m a fernet or well whiskey drinker, but at Wolski’s, I follow the bartenders’ lead with the orange vodka. I asked around about why this was the shot of choice behind the bar, but couldn’t find a clear answer. Plaques from bygone darts tournaments (steel-tipped, a matter of pride for regulars), are studded with missed bull’s-eye attempts in the raised back room alongside a pool table and the women’s restroom.
“It’s the kinda bar where regulars will walk in and have a beer waiting for them before they sit down,” says Joe Duehmig, a Wolski’s regular and member of a local sailing team that calls Wolski’s its unofficial home. Minutes after he told me this, members of the after-work crowd started to pour in from the snowstorm, the occasional regular greeted by a frosty pint.
Duehmig clarifies that entering Wolski’s is like making a tacit agreement of mutual trust and respect: “There aren’t electronic registers here; you just have to trust the bartender.” Instead of touch screens with card readers, bartenders use hulking, cartoonish, antique cash registers that are gathering rust and decorations and chime when someone pays with cash. The bartenders still take note of everything on paper.
Duehmig isn’t an outlier. Just about every Wolski’s regular I spoke with has personal ties to this final boss of neighborhood bars. “Everyone’s connected somehow,” says Rani Watson, a Wolski’s bartender with 23 years under her belt. “If somebody needs a lawyer, we have a lawyer; if somebody needs a mechanic, we have a mechanic.” Several people have met their spouses at the bar, too.
“If we’re gonna talk about the community, we’ve gotta talk about Bobcat Bernie,” says Lynch. I’d heard murmurs about him while talking to regulars and employees alike up and down the bar; he’s the guy who owns most of the property on the block, including Wolski’s. Nicknamed for his Bobcat brand snowblower, he plows the entire block when it snows.
The Bobcat showed up later in the evening. Bernie Bondar, great-grandson of bar founder Bernard Wolski, has been involved with the bar since he was 21, when he and his older brother took over the operation. This was back before Wolski’s was the tight-knit gathering place for eclectic groups, from sailing crews to art classes to darts teams. “It was really local when we took over. The bumper sticker thing kinda really did it.”
It all started because of the economic woes that shook the U.S. in the 1970s, especially pummelling industrial cities like Milwaukee: “We had people that would come in at noon and stay till 2 [a.m.]—14 hours.” These seasoned drinkers asked for something in return for staying at the bar all day, so they decided on a bumper sticker. “Well, then, everybody wanted one.”
