New Jersey State of Mind by Peter Genovese

Author:Peter Genovese [Genovese, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, State & Local, Middle Atlantic (DC; DE; MD; NJ; NY; PA), Travel, Northeast, Middle Atlantic (NJ; NY; PA)
ISBN: 9781978803909
Google: VW08yQEACAAJ
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Published: 2020-06-12T03:36:18+00:00

Straight Outta Camden

There’s a bullet hole in the window just above the Coors Lite sign, Zombie Killer beer in the cooler, a seething mass of meat and onions on the compact grill, Straight Outta Camden T-shirts behind the bar, and a grinning donkey’s head (sculpture, not the real thing) just inside the door.

It’s 10 a.m., and there’s exactly one customer inside Donkey’s Place in Camden, a grizzled man in his 50s wearing a ski cap, a half-empty cup of beer in front of him. Hey, whatever gets you through the night—or morning. To the right of him on the bar are giant jars of pickles and hot cherry peppers. Photos of boxers decorate the wall just above a shelf of vintage beer bottles, including long-gone Camden Beer. An American flag is draped across the brick exterior, a copper-colored awning hides that bullet hole from the outside, and consider yourself lucky if you can grab a space in the miniscule parking lot.

Donkey’s Place—part dive bar, part sports memorabilia museum, part cheesesteak paradise—as much a part of the city’s lore as Campbell Soup and His Master’s Voice. Weekdays, the bar technically doesn’t open until 10, but owner Rob Lucas is there at 8 sweeping the floors, and if he recognizes a person wanting to get in earlier, “they’ll get in,” he says. It’s also open on the first Saturday of each month at 7 a.m. Then Donkey’s transforms into a day-long party, with customers, many of them seniors, rocking dance moves that might have better been performed decades earlier.

Leon Lucas started it all. He was a lean, mean, jug-eared, fighting machine who was the U.S. amateur light heavyweight champion in 1928 and a member of the U.S. Olympic team in the 1928 Olympics in Amsterdam. After his boxing career was over, he decided to open a bar in Camden in 1947, in the space on Haddon Avenue formerly occupied by the Parkside Athletic Club, a speakeasy.

Why a bar and not, say, a pizzeria?

“Doesn’t everyone want to open a bar?” Rob Lucas replies. “Back then, Camden was nicer than Cherry Hill.” It would be called Donkey’s Place because that was the nickname Lucas acquired as a boxer; his punch was likened to a kick from a donkey or mule.

The bar back then “straddled the boundary between predominantly Polish Whitman Park and largely Jewish Parkside,” according to a recounting by Henry Szychulski and Camille Tesman-Huddell in Camden County Heritage magazine. Initially, roast beef sandwiches were the big draw. Then Lucas met someone who developed a mix of spices that worked well with cheesesteaks.

As a teen, Rob worked here peeling onions—“that was pretty much it,” he says. The place has scarcely changed over the years. Same bar, same back dining room, same scale (“Your ‘wate and fate’”), with a faded Parkside Athletic Club sign on the steps leading to the basement.

“I don’t think anything’s changed in here ever,” he says. “Maybe the drop ceiling.”

On the dining room wall is the old Donkey’s Place sign—a donkey framed by palm trees.

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