[Tooker Alley is part 15 in a series of tidbits from the chapters of my book Bars, Taverns and Dives New Yorkers Love, published by the good folks at Rizzoli Publishing. You can order it online now at Powell’s, Amazon, Rizzoli, and Barnes & Noble.]

“If you walk into a bar and there’s a cheap beer option, you know that everyone has a place at the table,” says Tooker Alley owner Del Pedro. And Del Pedro wants everyone to have a place at the table, or in this case the bar, so there’s always a good old cheap beer option, lately a tallboy of Ballantine Ale, an old-school brew you don’t see much these days. Pedro carries a torch for The Common Man. He’s a fan of the proletariat, a supporter of the working stiff, and the artwork hanging in Tooker Alley shows it.

To the left on the exposed brick as you walk in, you’ll see a large photo taken at an IWW protest march around 1920. The young man looking straight into the camera wears a fedora with a perfectly printed card stuck in it, boldly front and center, which states “BREAD OR REVOLUTION.” In the back of the long, narrow barroom there’s a framed poster featuring a grinning skull smoking a cigarette and wearing a World War I doughboy helmet. It dates to around that era and was made for an “anti-war dance,” sponsored by the Dil Pickle Club (yes, one L), a loose group of lefties, workers, liberated women, writers, kooks, dames, commies, intellectuals, swells, and bums who formed a pro-labor, pro-peace, fun-loving, bohemian salon in Chicago back in the early 20th century. All were welcome. Their little clubhouse was tucked away on Tooker Alley in Chicago’s near north side, and Pedro lifted the name.

The name and philosophy behind his Tooker Alley was, as Pedro says, “A reaction to Bloomberg New York. I wanted this to be a place of racial and economic diversity, where you meet people unlike you, like on the subway. There’s all kinds of diversity around here! Diversity makes bars dynamic, places where you can meaningfully encounter other people.”

Next up: Farrell’s Bar & Grill of Brooklyn’s Windsor Terrace neighborhood, another chapter of my book Bars, Taverns and Dives New Yorkers Love, which you can order right here. Limited-edition signed prints of the bars are available here.