Change comes to a landmark

A few feet away are the now-vacant phone booths, where tipsy reporters, politicians and faculty members eons ago queued to phone copy desks for questions and spouses with excuses.

Only my wife has remained so constant and ageless over the years. My first job as a big city reporter was covering the tavern’s namesake, Manuel Maloof, the fiery DeKalb County politician who once launched a blue fury at me for calling the place a “bar” instead of the more family friendly “tavern.”

My babies have grown to men; scores of moving boxes have been packed, unpacked and packed again. Legions of reporters, editors and a few publishers have come and gone. Great stories have risen and resolved only to be followed by fresh outrage or discovery. At this bar, we’ve drunk in wild celebration and found comfort in loss and humiliation.

So, it is hard not to fret when we are told that this tatty archive of our lives will close only to be reborn months hence as, what? A new version of itself? What happens to our stories, our lives?

Angelo Fuster doesn’t like this kind of talk.

Angelo pushes the idea that our collective past will transcend a plan to carefully knit this 60-year-old institution into the centerpiece of a development that will celebrate “walkable urbanism.” The celebration will include 70 or so apartments and new retail — some installed in the current tavern, which itself absorbed a few smaller businesses over the years.

Angelo assures us we’ll feel at home in Manuel’s 2.0. We’ll see.

It would be an exaggeration to say I’m a regular at Manuel’s. But it’s true that I’ve been an irregular for about 35 years. If you are a modern father, it is hard to desert the shared duties of homework, soccer, chauffeuring and bedtime story reader to spend your evenings drinking at the local.

When I go, it is almost always on a Tuesday night. I’ve stopped there a few times a year since Ronald Reagan was in the White House. A group of a half dozen or so lapsed politicians, reporters and assorted others have gathered there since the 1980s. They call themselves the Government in Exile. The faces have come and gone over the decades. A few – Angelo, Doug Teper, Tom Houck, Emory Morsberger – seem to be the core of today’s regulars, the GIE’s Mount Rushmore. Manuel himself anchored the group to his tavern in the late 1980s, when he grew to enjoy sitting with them on the occasional Tuesday nights. One Tuesday, he became infuriated as the group discussed meeting elsewhere. Manuel wasn’t going anywhere, and if his place wasn’t good enough then they could get the hell out.

Last Tuesday night was the graying group’s final evening before the change. Manuel’s will close tonight and be transformed as part of the grand plan to remake this shabby quarter of Atlanta at North Avenue and North Highland.

I sit with the larger-than-normal GIE assembly, around the large round table in the back corner of the front room. Up the stairs is the paneled room where a group gathered years ago to express their love to the son of a dear friend who had died too young.

The round tables at Manuel’s encourage conversation and promote egalitarianism. At this same table I sat more than 20 years ago to prove a reporter from Toronto was wrong about Atlanta. She had described our city, which was competing with Toronto for the 1996 Olympics, as pretty but soulless. I get that. Atlanta can seem a place of no more than glass, concrete and landscaping. In our rush to be the best and latest, we often erase our charms and quirks. Atlanta has too few characters like Manuel, who the Canadian reporter met and adored that night, and fewer relics like Manuel’s Tavern.

Last Tuesday, the discussion over the table bounced from national politics to old times. Teper, a former state legislator, recalled the days at the statehouse when lobbyists lost thousands of dollars playing poker with politicians. Perhaps not fully realizing this was just a way to stuff their pockets, some of the politicians bragged insufferably on their superior card-playing skills.

Despite the way it may sound, GIE is not a boys club. State Rep. Michele Henson and Anna Foote and Martha Porter Hall are frequent and lively members. Porter Hall doesn’t feel outnumbered. “But I like boys a lot,” she told me.

Inevitably the conversation Tuesday returned to the winter exile of the GIE. Angelo had helpfully provided a list of possible alternatives but struggled for consensus. At about 8:30, reality set in as the waitress reported the bar was running out of certain beers. The group was shaken.

Then came news that the traditional baskets of roasted peanuts would come no more. Morsberger, one of the few Republicans, best captured the gravity of this development. “We knew there would be no peanuts near the end,” he observed solemnly. On the wall above him hung the fierce head of a roaring pig, his ears draped with silver holiday pine cones.

Looking around the room Tuesday, it was hard to tell what will come of all who gather around these round tables to practice the dying art of conversation. Manuel’s serves as a sort of community center and trading floor for fantasy sports fans. What becomes of the regular meeting of fly fishermen?

By and by, it was time to leave the place for the final time in this incarnation. It’s a fragile magic that ties us to this place. I worry about that.

By Wednesday morning, the GIE debate about its future had shifted to email. No easy resolution was in sight.

Tonight, the kitchen is scheduled to shut down at 11 pm. At midnight, the taps will turn off.

The patrons will say a final goodnight and pull out of the parking lots one last time to head home from the Manuel’s Tavern they’ve known all their lives.

But they will all carry one final — and hopeful — message from Manuel. It’s printed on every sales check.

“Anybody don’t like this life is crazy …. Manuel.”