First Bar

First Street meanders through town much like a cholesterol choked artery, with every bit of the congestion and all the fits and starts of any other larger city’s main drag. By the time it reaches the neighborhood where I live though, it’s more a quaint one-way brick boulevard better suited to bicycles or pedestrian traffic than to cars or mass transit. Here, First Street is the center-piece of our fair city’s much ballyhooed historical district. Some rather clever and ambitious architects and developers have painstakingly restored and remodeled all the eyesores of turn of the century buildings that used to blight the old place, transforming them into the kinds of upscale apartments and condominiums young urbanites with too much money often find hard to resist.

An ancient YMCA is now the crash pad of choice for up and coming professionals, and an even older antebellum mansion, once a fine rest home for Civil War era widows, now houses young adults of both genders and every race and religion one can think of or imagine. Quite the melting pot we have here now, actually.

An early nineteen hundreds library is a small five star hotel and restaurant, and probably one of one of the best kept secrets in this part of the country. There’s even an opera house just beside it, built in the months leading up to WWI that has found new life as a jazz museum and art gallery. Together, they sponsor a jazz festival one weekend in the summer every year that will almost certainly become a tourist attraction if they aren’t more careful.

They’ve artfully landscaped the whole neighborhood to give it a sexy and romantic Roaring Twenties kind of atmosphere with authentic looking nineteen-twenties street lamps and park benches. There’s a small park with a sculpture that actually borders on real art if you squint just the right way, in addition to the obligatory white gazebo, and the whole neighborhood is kept as clean and tidy as Disneyland could wish to be.

The city has been especially generous with zoning laws, vendor permits and business licenses too, to make sure First Street is a uniquely pleasant place to live, work, shop, and play. In fact, once one gets to our little niche of a neighborhood, traffic patterns make it a bit difficult to leave in a hurry, and that’s just fine with everybody who lives and works here. All in all, a terrific place to be or to visit.

There’s a great little bar there where I spend way too much of my time. Some people might be lured into saying there are several bars there where I spend way too much of my time, and I can’t really argue with anyone who gives in to the temptation. There are maybe a dozen or so little restaurants, bars, clubs and bistros dotted up and down either side of First Street, seemingly strategically placed between expensive shops and artsy galleries just a block or two from where I live. Having learned to enjoy the inside of a bar much more than the outside, I stop in them all from time to time and know quite a bit about the goings on in our little neighborhood because of it.

But First Bar is clearly my favorite. It’s the first one you come to after First Street becomes one-way, hence the name I suppose, and I guess it fits pretty well. It’s not so much that First Bar is unique in any special way at first glance, though the building itself does have a home in the historical register. It was a fire station in its previous incarnation, back when horses actually pulled the engines and Dalmatians were really a part of the team. There are even authentic fire poles. But it’s not so very different from other buildings and bars around here at all really. At least from the outside.

It’s an especially well run establishment that gives its all to be an upscale eatery; the friendly kind of neighborhood restaurant where one can enjoy a good meal and maybe a drink with family or friends in a relaxed and casual atmosphere. Shortly after the sun goes down though, that ambition is cast almost recklessly aside and the bar is usually packed with younger people much more interested in drinking and mingling than in sitting down to a tasty fillet or a well prepared southern specialty.

It’s those patrons and the fun staff that make First Bar so special, I think. Oh, they come and they go, like at all bars. But First Bar always seems magically populated by a singular blend of sexy, exciting people you won’t find anyplace else in any other neighborhood. It’s a little difficult to tell First Bar’s story without telling their stories too. And who would try anyway? You see, the girls there are all young, foxy bi sluts with lusty appetites, and the guys are all handsome, charming, and well, shall we just say, gifted and blessed in more ways than one?

Yes, First Bar is a magical place and clearly my favorite. There are some sexy stories from there that just beg to be told, and to my mind, the best way to tell a story is to let the people in them have their say. In that way, not only do they tell their own, but each other’s as well. And who better to tell a story or two than those that are in them?

So pull up a stool and relax, let us pour you a drink. Enjoy some sexy stories from the very people that make First Bar my favorite bar in the friendliest little neighborhood in town....