The employees at Manuel's Tavern - that iconic Atlanta bar where politicos, police and pundits all meet - are in need of some help.
The bar will be temporarily shutting its door at the end of the year for a renovation project, putting the bar's roughly 60 employees out of work.
A GoFundMe account has been set up in their name, with a goal of raising $1,000 for each staffer.
Here's a snippet:
This GoFundMe is the work of Manuel's regulars, for whom the bar is a second home. The staff have become our friends, and this is our way of helping them out during this transition.
As for the memorabilia on the walls, the New York Times recently offered this piece about the effort to digitize the eclectic hodgepodge:
ATLANTA — The artist and documentary filmmaker Ruth Dusseault calls the stuff that has found its way onto the walls of Manuel's Tavern, a beloved Eisenhower-era dive bar here, an "organic archive" and a "60-year installation piece."
Those may be the loftiest descriptions ever applied to an overwhelming accretion of dusty beer cans, moldering sports pennants, law enforcement uniform patches, snapshots of well-known politicians and anonymous tipplers, risqué oil paintings traded as payment for ancient tabs, and the unmarked vessel, mounted above a shelf of drying pint glasses, that contains the ashes of Manuel Maloof, the original owner of the bar, who was once a towering figure in local Democratic Party politics.
