It was a good time to own a bar in southwest Brooklyn; the vibe didn’t accommodate restraint. But even as moods and tastes shifted, JJ Bubbles and Joe Joyce largely thrived — a son sent to Harvard, a daughter to graduate school at Brown, a getaway place bought in New Hampshire — until the cruelest interventions of the pandemic, last month.

I have heard about Joe Joyce for as long as I have known his oldest son, Eddie, a neighbor and friend, a lawyer turned novelist who was at odds with his father politically but grateful for his contradictions. Joe Joyce was a Trump supporter who chose selectively from the menu of current Republican ideologies, freely rejecting what didn’t suit him. He didn’t want to hear how much you loved Hillary Clinton, as one regular at his bar put it to me, but he was not going to make the Syrian immigrant who came in to play darts feel as if he belonged anywhere else.

Last year, Vice Media went to JJ Bubbles and other bars in Bay Ridge to talk to supporters of the current president and landed on some of these ambiguities, discovering for instance the guy who admired Pete Buttigieg as much as he loved Donald Trump. Where these kinds of voters align is not in the right’s hatred of the marginalized but in its distrust of the news. If the “liberal” media was telling us that a plague was coming and that it would be devastating, why should anyone believe it? Joe Joyce had his skepticism.

The longevity of a bar in New York can almost always be tracked in inverse proportion to its snobbishness. Those that cater to the well paid and highly self-regarding rarely survive consecutive presidential administrations. Novelty compels, and the caravan invariably moves on.

JJ Bubbles became an institution for those who remain: transit employees, ironworkers, teachers, sanitation guys, cops, firefighters, civil servants, accountants, retirees from all those occupations who, for the most part, sought their pleasures close to where they lived and in many cases where they had grown up. Neighborhood bars are places of consistency. For the near entirety of its existence, JJ Bubbles kept only two kinds of beer on tap: Bud and Bud Light. Every fourth drink was free.