Why were bars always on corners? The first time I heard the song, I understood “the corner” to mean a bar right away, and I was pretty young, like, an older teen, but I knew by that point that “the corner” was code for a bar.
I’ve never gone to bars much, and really not at all in the last 15 years or so, but now that I think, the ones I did go to were all on corners.
Did it have something to do with needing separate entrances and exits that were not right next to each other? Or did they lend themselves to the actual bar inside being 90°, which made it easier for a single bartender to be attentive to everyone?
I would also go for noise. If you’re the one living on the corner, especially on the ground floor, you’re going to get a lot of traffic noise. A bar is the source of the noise and won’t even notice the traffic.
I don’t think it’s specifically a bar thing. In a neighborhood with a mix of commercial and residential, the commercial properties will usually be on corners. Bars are just an example of a business that’s often in or near a mostly-residential neighborhood.
Yeah this is pretty much what I was going to say-- when I think of “the corner bar” I’m also picturing “the neighborhood bar”. I picture it out east, say in a Boston neighborhood, in which most of the street would be residences and the bars were on the corners. The bar was always dark, even in midday, not very full, mostly older guys at the bar, not sitting at the few rickety tables. A small old coin-op pool table with worn out, stained felt sat in the corner, hardly ever played. Once in awhile a couple young guys would come in, maybe with their girlfriends, make jokes about the place and get a game of pool going, ignoring the stinkeye from the regulars at the bar. But they’d get bored and go their own way soon enough, leaving the place to the regulars again…until their wives called and told the bartender to send them home (or marched down to the bar if they were really mad).
Corners are higher value real estate, because of their visibility to passing trade and opportunity to get access from two different directions, which is really desirable for bars and gas stations and drive through churches. Bars make money and can afford the real estate so that’s why you see them there, but not the churches.
Bars and restaurants prefer corner locations in cities to get the longer span of windows on two sides. These would be old fashioned bar and grill type places serving as much food in the daylight hours as drinks. The late night bars don’t care about windows much, might even have them blacked out.
That is surprising. Customers eating in tend to prefer tables and booths by windows, and usually windows behind a bar would be considered wasted space. Perhaps this is an old fashioned concept for any type of bar now. I can’t think of a corner bar around here, but I have noticed new construction for bars and restaurants have limited windows, so maybe there’s a new paradigm in effect.
In the town I grew up in, a town of 600, there were three bars*, and only one was on the corner. (It’s still there, and still has the same sign on the outsde, just a bit more rusty.)
I’d say that less than half of the bars in the towns around were “corner taps”. Many were free standing buildings, so I don’t know if that’s a “corner bar” or not. Four corners? Well, this one is on “a” corner at least.
Modern bar locations are not useful for answering this question. The history goes back at least 100 years, or even into the 19th century. And it involves older northeastern walkable cities rather than western car-centric cities.
Yes, neighborhood bars were primarily on corners. Most of the reasons have already been mentioned, but I’ll put them together.
Neighborhoods imply houses, i.e. residential areas rather than large commercial roads. Few businesses existed off the main roads in neighborhoods, and those which did were primarily located on the intersection of two of the larger streets, the prime real estate location and therefore the most expensive. Bars had advantages over other types of businesses; they could stay open more hours, catering to the day-drinkers and the nighttime revelers. Remember that neighborhood businesses had much shorter hours generally than today’s 24-hour pharmacies and supermarkets. Bars were among the very few places open after dark. They often also served food, in an era where the number of neighborhood restaurants were a tiny fraction of what they are today.
I think windows did play a part, though they were a bonus because of the corner location. The visibility of the lighted, cozy, crowded room filled with neighbors was a definite draw. They also lent themselves to advertising that ameliorated costs.
I walked a half mile to school down a residential street. It had one “major” corner. The bar was a permanent fixture. The commercial building across the street never seemed to have a working business for more than a moment.
You could put a bar anywhere on a big commercial street, but you wouldn’t want to put one in the middle of a residential block between actual homes. Those neighbors would raise hell. Sticking them on the least offensive location, a major corner, was always the best solution.
As has been astutely noted by previous posters, many (most?) Wisconsin towns don’t have enough corners to accommodate all the bars there, so midstreet bars are quite standard here.
