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This classic beer joint, unfortunately long gone with the revamping of West 7th Street into Dallas West, was located a few blocks west of Montgomery Plaza.
Me and my good buddy, William Bryan Massey III, head cook at Fred's Texas Cafe, used to go to it regularly in the late '90s to drink beer and play darts.
The place had six dart boards and people would be playing at 2-3 of them most of the time we were there. It was simply a good time place. The crowd was older folks who enjoyed each other's company and their drinks and the dart games.
I used a Sony Mavica FD-91 1-megapixel camera that stored images on a floppy disk, and a top notch model in its day (the late '90s), to take this photo and because the photo was so shitty upon looking at it again while going through really old photos from days long past I worked my ass off in enlarging and improving its look by using two image editors, Adobe Photoshop Elements 7 and Capture NX.
I was enjoying a relaxing time at this one-of-a-kind bar, which has since moved due to Fort Worth's race to become Dallas West along the West 7th Street corridor, when I captured my buddy, William Bryan Massey III, head of kitchen operations at Fred's Texas Cafe, in this classic barfly repose.
It's a great tragedy that J&J's Hideaway will be lost at its current location. It will relocate to University Drive near where the Italian restaurant Sardine's is.
But J&J's Hideaway will never be the same as it was, tucked away under tall trees and a safe distance from the rustle and bustle of the near West Side.
It's classic '70s decor had me tell Bryan that "this is a bar straight out of that old '70s t.v. show THE ROCKFORD FILES."
He answered, "God damn, you're right."
Located on Arlington's Division Street, a four lane thoroughfare through the middle of town, that is populated with pawn shops, seedy motels, suspect car lots, bail bondsmen businesses, car repair places, beer joints, dives and other shady flotsam and jetsam enterprises, is the Why Not? Club, which advertises in neon outside its front entrance "COLDEST DRINKS IN TOWN."
As I drove up and down Divison looking for photo ops, after taking a trip over to Arlington Camera, a place full of stuck up salespeople who cater to their favored clientel over unknown individuals truly interested in photography, a place with a snobby staff (why are these photo geeks such dicks and clueless as to what they're selling?) for a Nikon Day demo in order to check out the then new D700, which I eventually purchased off of eBay on Black Friday --- the day after Thanksgivings Day ---- in 2008, I spotted this classic beer joint, just a small, simple square red brick building in the shape of a shoe box, and stopped by to get a photograph, using my D80, of the bar's groovy as hell sign.
This classic beer joint, unfortunately long gone with the revamping of West 7th Street into Dallas West, was located a few blocks west of Montgomery Plaza.
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