The ordinance, of course, incensed locals fond of sucking down butts with their seven ounce beers, the accepted practice ever since the space on the northeast corner of 13th and Pine opened as a tavern amid the dying gasps of Prohibition. “So many people were so angry about it,” says Sweitzer. But they gradually came around, shifting to the sidewalk to spare adjacent lungs and the nicotine-pummeled ceiling panels, which still offer a distinct gouda-yellow Pall Mall patina today.

The asthmatic non-smoker had spent 14 straight years choking her way through shifts at Dirty Frank's, the Center City bar she ended up buying. Her post-work routine involved peeling her clothes off outside the front door and sprinting into the shower, the best strategy she could muster for minimizing the stench inside her home. “It was on me, like a wool sweater in the summertime,” recalls Sweitzer. “It was disgusting.”

A former employee who came on as Sweitzer’s partner when prior owner Jay McConnell retired to the Jersey Shore in 2011, Brad Pierce wears a wry grin as he brings up Brian and Nan, customers he first met sometime in the 1980s. The couple eventually moved away, and Pierce figured they’d lost touch—until Nan materialized, years later, with a very specific request. Brian, sadly, had passed. But before he did, he stipulated that his remains find eternal repose at his all-time favorite hang.

Even when Dirty Frank's changes, Dirty Frank's doesn’t. Stuck in its ways in the most reverential sense of the phrase, it’s a seam in time, providing safe passage to an older, odder Philadelphia. A gleaming oasis of weird in a town beset by 21st-century slickening, it’s always made people its primary business, no matter who those people are.

“Nan asked if it would be OK if she put his ashes in a hole in the wall, over there by the dartboard,” says Pierce, gesturing past a sea of tchotchkes in the direction of the long-since-patched resting place. “I said sure, go ahead. So Brian’s in there, somewhere.”

It’s been this way since the beginning. The origin’s muddled, but most agree that the bar’s namesake was a Ukrainian immigrant named Frank Vigderman. He was the proprietor of 347 South 13th Street beginning in 1933, though he's not currently found among the collection of "Famous Franks" (Sinatra, Zappa, of Assisi, -enstein etc.) muralist David McShane painted on the building in 2001 and has added to over the years. In old photos, you can make out an exterior sign reading “Frank’s Bar”—no “Dirty” in sight. Some claim that Vigderman had poor hygiene, leading to the pejorative’s common use. Others attribute the adjective to John Segal, who made a habit of covering the floor in sawdust to expedite cleaning after taking over from Vigderman in 1959.

In truth, Frank’s has always had a “type,” but the profile was not built using banal criteria like sex, race, religion, education or income. It instead takes a shine to individuals who can’t be neatly filed into the natural order, and don’t wish to be—a “crossroads for errant individualists,” as the Philadelphia Inquirer put it in 1982 . Curious conversationalists tend to do well. “It’s definitely a bar that cherishes those that bring something to the table,” says Sweitzer, an artist and teacher who was a regular herself before coming onboard in 1992. “Those who aren’t capable of that get bored and leave.”

Segal, whose early attempt to rename the bar “347” was swiftly rejected in favor of its colloquial name, ran Dirty Frank's for all of the ‘60s and most of the ‘70s, a pivotal stretch that saw it blossom into a notorious haven for the counterculture. "Dirty Frank's is an American melting pot with drinks,” the Inquirer wrote in 1973. “Its clientele includes sanitation workers, lawyers, students, dropouts from virtually anything, artists, clerks, poets, reporters, straights and occasional gays, blacks and whites, adventurous post-teeny boppers from the Northeast and a beloved old man who always wears a blue beret.”

You still have to pay cash, regardless who you are.

How did Frank’s become so known for inclusion in an era stricken by segregation, racial tension and social unrest? Sweitzer attributes it to the precedent set by the late Segal, a fondly remembered mensch with an unimpeachable reputation. Its central location encourages a diverse crowd, as do traditions like Off the Wall, the gallery within the bar that's showcased local art work since the 70s. Its popularity with whistle-wetting journalists of the period stoked the mythos, too. Writers Clark DeLeon and Pete Dexter, of the Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, were frequent visitors, filing columns from Frank’s (and about Frank’s) throughout their careers. But they were far from the only associates with a penchant for spinning raffish yarns.

“It’s definitely a bar that cherishes those that bring something to the table."