Most licenses now go to well-heeled buyers in areas like Center City, Herron tells me. “It’s almost as if the neighborhood bar is quickly disappearing from Philadelphia,” says Paul Herron, one of the few liquor lawyers in the city who act as lonely boatmen, selling liquor licenses from dead businesses and ferrying them to new owners around town. But in Philly, the corner bars are mostly just going. It’s likely nothing similar will take its place soon - or open anywhere nearby. As of last year, Wanda’s Lounge is no more. He plans to name his next album Wanda’s Lounge, in tribute to the bar that helped shape him. “There were so many regulars, it made me think of the television show Cheers,” Marshall says - a comparison made by seemingly every old head who knew the spot. Half the stuff he samples, he’s pretty sure, is just a subliminal transmission from Wanda’s. The music wafted through the floorboards or poured out the doors, and he soaked it up by osmosis: Patti LaBelle, Gladys Knight, the Temptations, the Whispers. But back in the ’70s, he was a kid in Southwest Philly, living upstairs from Wanda’s. He’s now a high-school teacher in North Carolina - and a Billboard-charted rapper under the name Official 3-2. It was here that Sean Marshall learned to love music, long before he could even sit at the bar. For half a century, Wanda’s was the sort of down-the-way spot one always hopes might be down the way: a mirror-walled watering hole about as wide and as long as a train car, with a soundtrack of R&B and a tight line of barstools occupied by customers who might be best known locally as “Disco Doc” or “Stonewall Jackson.” There was room for dancing, if the spirit took you, and a corner stage where a local musician could get his start. There were many bars like it, but this one was a wee corner dive on a residential block of Kingsessing, in Southwest Philly. The neighborhood bar on the corner is becoming a thing of the past.
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