The Times's Cate Doty pens a deservingly loving portrait of a real neighborhood bar:
[W]e’ve gotten to recognize the regulars at Shenanigans, a Kensington institution. There’s the guy who takes care of the horses at Kensington Stables, whose clothes carry the fragrance of his job. David, an elevator mechanic who drinks only Budweiser. A Mohawk ironworker, Lindsay, who lives upstairs and prefers Killian’s.
The regulars are a microcosm of Kensington’s nonallegiance to any particular ethnicity or social crowd. You’ve got your Brooklyn natives, some young writer types, a few Polish men and, David noted with some surprise, a Muslim man.
Buddy McCarthy, whose wife, Kathleen, owns the bar, arrives daily to clean. A 74-year-old son of Brooklyn, Mr. McCarthy said he started coming to Shenanigans when he was underage; he and a cousin used to climb through a window in the back to buy beer. Mrs. McCarthy bought the bar in the mid-1980s from a Brooklyn family whose son, until recently, tended bar there on the weekends. They didn’t change much — updated the bathrooms and bought a few new televisions.
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“We like to keep it low key,” said Mr. McCarthy, a former liquor salesman who drinks only beer.
He said his crowd had changed somewhat over the past couple of years. “The yuppies moved in,” he said.