City Paper’s Chris Ross hangs out Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar from opening to close. That’s from 7am to 2am or 19 hours. Seems like a good way to spend a day and it certainly makes for a fun read.

It’s Your Birthday [City Paper]

From the title to the photograhs, Philadelphia Weekly’s food issue is obviously inspired by Sarah Stolfa’s, the Regulars. Whether quizzo players, dive bar squatters or strip bar voyeurs, every bar has them and needs them. What worries us is how many of them we recognize.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name
Tipping Point
Get Your Game On
Kingdom Come
For The Love Of Mike
Lapping It Up

Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar has long been a dive bar but for less time it has been a hipster paradise.

Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar, the quintessential old South Philly taproom, has become hipster-driven, at least on Thursdays. That’s when jam-session cats – mostly graduates from the University of the Arts and Temple University, with a median age of 23 – play elegant improvisational jazz and soft standards.

Led by drummer Pete Gaudioso and pianist Anam Owili-Eger in Ray’s second room, 11 horn players (trumpet, trombone, sax), four bassists, three guitarists, and one harmonica player sign up and sit in. That’s a jazz soup.

Ray’s opens at 7 AM and their web site promises smoking will return when they get their permit. Show up on your birthday and receive a drink for free.

Ray’s The Happy Birthday Bar [Official Site]