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"      Published in the October 2013 80th Anniversary issue A year and a half ago, Bill&amp;#039;s, a bar on East 54th Street in New York, fell victim to Manhattan&amp;#039;s endemic landlord greed. This happens all the time in a place like Manhattan, of course. Yet Bill&amp;#039;s had been open in the same spot since 1931, when it started as a speakeasy. In its 81 years, it had only three owners, and between them they made it into what was perhaps the finest example of an old-school saloon in the country, the kind of place that drips history and can support a crowd of regulars who make interesting conversation with a stranger. The bartender made a fine Rob Roy and the piano player knew &amp;quot;All of Me.&amp;quot; Its loss was a real blow. Yet in the mid-1930s, when Esquire began writing about it, Bill&amp;#039;s was hardly the mature place it ended up becoming. When Prohibition ended and Bill&amp;#039;s opened legally, it did so as &amp;quot;Bill&amp;#039;s Gay Nineties&amp;quot; \u2014 a nostalgia joint. The waiters sang songs 35 years out of date, and they gave you little cardboard mustaches to clip under your nose. It was a hot time in the old town, yes indeedy. I thought of Bill&amp;#039;s and its journey a few months ago, when I went to the top two cocktail bars in Denver. One, the Green Russell, you enter through an elaborate but mostly fake pie shop. The other, Williams &amp;amp;amp; Graham, you enter through an elaborate but mostly fake bookshop. Gimmicky. So, I suppose, are the grow lights at the Green Russell, allowing the bar to raise various herbs and such in its underground space, and so are some of the cocktails on offer at both joints, bitteredged things knocked together from &amp;quot;housemade&amp;quot; thises and &amp;quot;artisanal&amp;quot; thats; tinctures and infusions and sometimes awkward-tasting local spirits. With all that, both places are excellent examples of the state-of-the-art modern bar, the kind of enterprise that is to 2013 what the fern bar was to 1973 or the tiki bar to 1953. But few fern bars survived their era the way Bill&amp;#039;s did. I have more hope for many of the new cocktail bars. Williams &amp;amp;amp; Graham, for instance, is run by Sean Kenyon, a third-generation bartender, the son and grandson of men who ran dive bars in New Jersey. He&amp;#039;s a real bartender who knows how to run a real bar, and once you get beyond the moving bookcase that lets you into the place, that&amp;#039;s exactly what you find. The place is hospitable, attitude-free, and civilized, as if it had had its rough edges rubbed smooth by decades of service. Right now, it&amp;#039;s only two years old. It took Bill&amp;#039;s at least 20 years to settle into its timelessness; with Kenyon at the helm, Williams &amp;amp;amp; Graham should get there sooner. It won&amp;#039;t be alone when it gets there. Most of the best new cocktail bars are run by careful men and women who pay a lot of attention to the fundamentals of the business. (The way America&amp;#039;s going, there&amp;#039;s going to be no helping hand for them if they don&amp;#039;t.) Sure, some of the rituals at the places might be precious, but you&amp;#039;ll always get a glass of ice water when you sit down, a properly stirred manhattan, a well-chosen single-malt Scotch. And in a few years, as new microdistilleries mature, those underaged local whiskeys behind the bar will no longer be underaged, and some of them will be damn good. When Esquire&amp;#039;s 160th anniversary rolls around, there&amp;#039;s a good chance our grandkids will be sitting at Williams &amp;amp;amp; Graham or the Green Russell, toasting it with 18-year-old Leopold Bros. whiskey, made locally since 2008.  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/a24996/state-drinking-amazing-1013/>