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This story appears in our Fall 2026 issue featuring cover star Charli XCX, on newsstands September 28th. Want us to come to your place? Subscribe here to get it delivered to your door.
By day, they bent steel, fabricated engine parts, and manufactured mufflers. But when the whistle blew, Jiggs, Dinky, Brushy, Pudgy, Stork, Zeke, and dozens of other factory workers headed to George Brown’s Bar, a blue-collar drinking hole in a Polish Ukrainian neighborhood crisscrossed by train tracks and speckled with smokestacks just south of Chicago. They went to share a laugh and commiserate, to celebrate weddings, anniversaries, retirements—and life itself.
In 1971 John Banasiak, then just 21, began working at George Brown’s, pouring Schlitz, Hamm’s, Blatz, and Bud from his spot behind the bar. Banasiak was also taking pictures. And now, half a century later, those pictures are collected in his new book, George Brown’s Bar (Nazraeli, $65), an inky-black and spotlight-white ode to old-school drinking establishments—the ones with lots of cigarette smoke and no cocktails with more than three ingredients—and to the people who drank there.
The regulars talked about work, wives, the White Sox, and, inevitably, about WWII. They’d all served. They’d all been through something dangerous and unpredictable, and for many, it represented the high point of their days. As Banasiak writes, the war was like “the ghost at the far end of the bar,” edging closer the more everyone drank. Some bars you go to in order to forget; guys came to George Brown’s to remember.
Banasiak went on to art school and a series of photo jobs (including, notably, as a photo assistant at Playboy) before becoming a professor of photography. And the men and women in his big-hearted photos? For the most part, they’re all gone now. And so is George Brown’s; it burned down in 1982. But the spirit of the regulars, so present in this beautiful book, can still be found at a dive near you.