A new streaming movie showcases McGillin’s Olde Ale House and its 165 years of tipsy memories

Back in 2022, Eric Carosella, 28, was a young South Philly filmmaker searching for inspiration for his debut feature film.

Bouncing ideas off a friend over beers in the cozy upstairs room of McGillin’s Olde Ale House — he had long been a fan of the storied and timeworn 165-year-old tavern on Drury Street — it hit him.

History pours from every nook of Philly’s oldest operating public house.

The sepia-toned ghosts and rogues gallery of tipsy-eyed merrymakers captured in the countless photographs paper the bar’s dark-paneled walls. The blue-collar mentality of survival that has kept the suds flowing in an alehouse that has endured a Civil War, two World Wars, prohibition, a Great Depression, and two pandemics.

Carosella didn’t need an idea. He was sitting in it.

“It’s been the town hall of Center City for as long as it’s been there,” he said. “It has a history that’s really tangible — and a certain charm that you can’t really find anywhere else.”

On Thursday, Carosella’s documentary, McGillin’s: Philadelphia’s Oldest Bar, debuts on WHYY, with a watch party planned in the same dark-paneled parlor where inspiration struck the director. This comes after a showing of the film at McGillin’s in October, when a packed house cheered and toasted the 42-minute documentary that tells the tale of a tavern — but also of a city.

Carosella made his four-year passion project through the local production company he founded after college, Clearbound Media, with friends and creative partners, Christopher Gaida, Bendan McCafferty, and Tina Duncan.

The film quickly evolved into something more than just an ode to colorful characters and suds-soaked history of the bar that Irish immigrants and husband and wife, William and Catherine McGillin, first opened as the Bell in Hand Tavern in a rundown Drury Street trinity in 1860.

That same year, a fellow named Abraham Lincoln got elected president.

You can’t tell the story of McGillin’s without telling the history of the city, and its fiercely proud and passionate denizens, said Carosella, who studied film at Pace University, and works days at his family’s South Philly building supply store.

“It’s a place Philadelphians have been coming to connect and have fun and find love and watch sports for more than 150 years,” he said. “Everyone has a McGillin’s story.”

Interviewees include McGillin’s co-owner, Chris Mullins, Jr., whose family has run the bar since 1958; Philly urban historian, Stephen Nepa; famed brewmaster, Carol Stoudt, who founded Stoudts Brewing Company in Adamstown in 1987, and whose beer has flowed from McGillin’s 31 taps for decades.

Staff and proud regulars like Philly sports radio and TV personality Natalie Egenolf also make appearances.

“There’s that tradition, oral history and family stories that keep people coming back year after year after year,” Mullins, Jr. says in the film. “It’s part of my DNA, part of our customer’s DNA, part of our staff’s DNA. Not everyone can tell stories from a hundred years ago. We can.”

And there are plenty of stories.

Over the years, starlets and stars, and working stiffs have rubbed elbows at McGillins.

Starting out, “Pa” and “Ma” McGillins raised 13 children in the upstairs rooms of their beat-up alehouse, which didn’t look anything like the bar today, even as it quickly expanded into connecting rowhouses. Reserved and spare, Pa McGillin stubbornly refused the pleas of his wife and customers to spruce up the joint, says Mullins, Jr., who serves as the bar’s oral historian in the film.

After Pa’s death in 1901, Ma McGillin got to work. She tore the alehouse down and rebuilt it as it looks today. She also renamed Bell in Hand to its nickname, McGillin’s Olde Ale House.

The iron-fisted alehouse matriarch took no guff. She posted a list of rowdy regulars who could no longer cross the sill, blacklisting even prominent Philly politicians and big-spending swells for breaking house rules.

During the dry years of prohibition, Ma McGillin shut the front door of the tavern, and then quickly opened a side entrance, says Mullins, Jr.

“There are a lot of theories that we probably did operate through prohibition,” says Mullins, Jr. “Being so close to City Hall it’s quite possible that some of these people were sneaking in here for some of the beer that was left down in the cellar.”

It was national news when Ma McGillin died in 1936. For a time, her daughter, Mercedes McGillin Hooper and her husband, William “Doc” Hooper, ran things.

“He was definitely a little wild,” Meg Woody, the Hoopers’ great-great granddaughter, says of Doc.

Doc Hooper’s legendary late night parties at McGillin’s never suffered from a shortage of women.

“Not like a tawdry house,” she says in the film, with a smile. “But there was definitely some experienced Philadelphia ladies hanging in the pub after hours.”

McGillin’s has since evolved into a craft beer bar, sports watching haven and match-making mecca. In February, the bar hosted a reunion for married couples who met at McGillin’s. It was packed.

Coincidentally, the bar is also where Martino Picareiello, Carosella’s drinking partner that fateful night four years ago, met his soon-to-be-bride, Amy.

That same night when inspiration struck, right before walking out the door.

What’s at the heart of Carosella’s film is the idea that what makes the bar truly rare is just how special a place it has in so many Philadelphian hearts.

“We made this movie to showcase their stories,” he said, adding that for weeks after the crowd erupted in cheers at last year’s bar screening, he was flooded with emails from staff and patrons, old and new, who shared their own cherished McGillin’s memories.

After its debut on WHYY, the documentary will be available to stream on PBS Passport. Carosella hopes to develop it into a larger series on America’s oldest bars.

The thriving tavern only grows more legendary with each passing year, Carosella said.

“And it truly deserves it,” he said.

“McGillin’s: Philadelphia’s Oldest Bar” plays on WHYY-TV (Channel 12) on Thursday, 7:30 p.m. The watch party starts at 6:30 p.m. at McGillin’s Olde Ale House, 1310 Drury St. RSVP at events.ticketleap.com