We could hit one more bar on our way out of town, or get to the airport early. Since we were all the way on the West Coast we opted to go for the one. We arrived at the Philosopher’s Club in San Francisco’s West Portal neighborhood. A fella a few stools over from us overheard our San Fran-quest to hit a bunch of iconic bars, so we rattled off the other places on our list.
“Ehh you don’t need to go there. It’s a fag bar,” a bar patron deterred.
I was a bit taken aback. I wasn’t expecting any LGBTQ hate in San Francisco, a city with such a history of Pride. So I nodded politely and sipped my Anchor beer.
The Philosopher’s Club in San Francisco was on my list of places I had to stop while in town, and despite the click-baity, rage-bait lede, it was a fantastic bar. I just use that to point out for y’all to realize, how far you think we’ve come, we’ve bit a ways to go.
I’d actually circled the Philosopher’s Club high on my list to of bars to visit (as I did Twin Peaks, the pub the barstool bigot bemoaned about), but because it was an outlier on our weekend concerned with A’s games and Anchor beer, we’d have to carve a route to get there.
The Philosopher’s club got her name in the 1930’s when it opened after Prohibition. I didn’t catch the exact origin of the name, but I think it’s fair to assume it’s a dig at the teetotalers who just lost the battle for booze.
The entrance is cavernous, carved right out of the winding hillsides of West Portal. The arched awning and stone-lined doorway lead you into one of the best places to watch (and lay some money down on) the Niners while being judged by 32 of the world’s greatest thinkers. Though we were there on a summer Friday, we could tell that the Philosopher’s club was really a place that shines on Sundays, and the mural only enhances the atmospheric pressure.
The famed mural at Philosopher’s club features nearly three dozen of the greatest thinkers in the recorded history of mankind. Freud. Gandhi. Socrates. Lao Tzu. Whole gang is here. We imagine gamedays. Pitchers and nachos. Wall-to-wall 49ers fans. And with its history as a numbers room, the full spectrum of human emotions is observed by philosophers, who peer down as if in a gallery in an hospital’s operating room.
Imagine you look up in despair toward Nietszche pointing and laughing yet another lost halftime parlay (and Joseph Campbell encouraging you to double down on the 2nd Half over). And if you don’t get that drunk, surely the regulars will roast your Brock Purdy stanning-ass.
We ordered a couple Anchors’ on draft and plopped our guide on the bartop. The 138-page book that steered our barcrawl had guided us to some of San Francisco’s greatest dive bars. Why not trust it for one (or two) more hurrah’s before we left town.
And boy, the Philly, as the cool kids call it, did not disappoint.
The bartender hadn’t the slightest idea that the bar was in the book. Or that the book even existed. He pulled out his cheaters and flipped through the entry. Then he began to flip through the book and give us the 3 line history of every bar he’d wound up in at one time or another. He moved page to page feverishly, and then through the index. Rapid fire. Quickly spitting out names, and memories, and “My fuck!”’s. Tales of wine, women and song. The good, the bad and the ugly. He was taking us on a tour of San Francisco dives at a mile a minute. It was that kind of way locals speak when you ask them about their favorite part of their town and they yammer gleefully for the next hour. And his favorite part of San Francisco was its bars. And that was quickly becoming my favorite part of it too.
He flipped back to the Philosopher’s Club entry of J.K. Dineen’s High Spirits: Legacy Bars of San Francisco.
“Hey, there’s Dick!” he exclaimed. “I gotta show him this. That picture’s right over there. Oh wow!’
I strolled over to the bright side of the bar and sure enough, the same picture in the book was hanging on the wall. Dick Donahue grew up blocks from the bar and bought it a while back. To be honest, I didn’t know San Francisco had such a rich pub & tavern history going into the trip. I’d picked up John Barleycorn for the trip, but hardly had time to read it on the trip. The city’s role as a major port in the west during the last 200 years and the mass Irish immigration, that’s the perfect storm for neighborhood pubs like the Philly.
We met Dick and he could not have been more of a gracious guy. Chatted with us, bought us a round and gave me a free poster of the Philosopher’s Club mural.
I was quietly impressed with the selection of philosophers selected. In High Spirits, the mural’s artist (and bar’s co-owner) Deborah Sullivan said “I wanted someone of every culture, ethnicity” to “give meaning to the bar’s name.” One of those connections I absolutely loved was the fact that she included one of the bar’s patrons in the mural: Jacob Needleman, who taught philosophy at nearby San Francisco State University for 50 years and stops by the bar on occasion.
Mother Jones, Bob Dylan, and Martin Luther King are my favorite philosophers to make the cut.
Not in love with John Lennon making the cut. I’d have added Kurt Vonegut or maybe Fred Hampton. I’m sure you have you deletions and additions you’d like to see too.
Almost as impressive as the mural was their wall of San Francisco Giants bobbleheads. They must have had every giveaway bobble since the practice became commonplace in the late 1990s.
“Hey, what’s that White Sox player doing up there?” I exclaimed, seeing a pinstriped player in what looked like the 1919 “Black Sox” home uniforms.
“Nah. Seals,” the bartender said after grabbing his cheaters and blowing the dust off the bobble’s base.
I think I was seeing things that I wanted to see. I wanted to see a connection to my White Sox. The place felt like such a South Side bar, down to the troughed urinals, that I thought it was home. Sure felt like it, which is hard to do 2,600 miles from Midway.
But I’ll leave the psychoanalysis to Freud. Lord knows he’s sick of picking apart 49ers fans.
Jake Berent 
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