There is often a lively crowd at Manci’s Antique Club, but this spring the popular bar and restaurant has one more reason to raise a glass: the building that houses it has turned 100.
Standing at the corner of Main Street and Belrose Avenue in downtown Daphne, the former service station has been a cornerstone of the community for a century — an arrangement, regulars will tell you, that the building seems likely to keep. The milestone was marked with a proclamation, a ceremonial ribbon-cutting out front and a crowd of well-wishers swapping stories about a place that has, in some ways, been the beating heart of the Eastern Shore’s oldest city for generations.
“We’re talking about a building that is actually older than the city of Daphne,” Mayor Robin LeJeune said at the ceremony. “How cool is that? We won’t celebrate the city’s 100 years until 2027.”
From produce warehouse to corner bar
According to the generally accepted historical record, Italian immigrants Frank Manci and Angelo Trione built the brick-and-concrete structure in 1924 on the site of a wooden produce warehouse. When Prohibition ended in 1933, a small bar serving beer was added inside — the seed of everything that followed.
Frank Manci was one of the original colonists who founded Daphne, a successful farmer who owned both the cotton gin and the sawmill, and he ran the corner business until 1947, when he passed it to his son. Arthur “Buster” Manci Sr. — a banker who also served as mayor of Daphne from 1951 to 1964 — introduced hard liquor in 1967, and it was Buster and his wife, Avis, known to everyone as “Tootsie,” who filled the place with the antiques and collectibles that give Manci’s its name.
Buster died in 1984, and his son Alex took over. It was Alex and his wife, Gwen, who first started serving food, and they ran Manci’s for the better part of three decades before abruptly shutting it down in the fall of 2014 to retire.
The revival
The place went dark for a few months — long enough for regulars to fret — until seasoned restaurateurs Harry Johnson and John Thompson stepped in, bringing Garrett DeLuca in as a partner a couple of years later. The pedigree was exactly right: Johnson had a proven record of reviving historic establishments, including the famous Bluegill Restaurant on the Causeway, and Thompson had been the longtime owner of Callaghan’s Irish Social Club in Mobile, one of the Gulf Coast’s most beloved neighborhood bars.
“We didn’t change it very much, but we did do a lot of cleaning,” Johnson said. “Buster Manci and his wife, Tootsie, traveled a lot and collected antiques, and people also would bring in stuff and they would buy it. They collected a ton of stuff over the years, and when we took over, we held a public auction before we opened and sold a lot of what was in the display cases because we needed room for tables, chairs, booths, and entertainment.”
The current owners also added an adjoining section, Buster’s Brick Oven, serving pizzas, wine and spirits — named, deliberately, in tribute to the man who ran the place for forty years.
A century of stories in the walls
Ask anyone about Manci’s and the conversation turns quickly to the decor: the vast collection of whiskey decanters, the antique firearms, the huge array of hotel keys from around the world, one of the original gas pumps still standing just outside the front door, and walls of framed photos preserving Daphne’s past — including black-and-white blowups of skiffs full of flounder from historic jubilees, the cold-water phenomena that make Mobile Bay famous.
“There’s a feeling of permanence here. It’s wonderful that in this world where everything constantly goes so very fast, this is still here for us and our community,” said Casey Williams, president of the Eastern Shore Chamber of Commerce, who kicked off the anniversary presentation by joking that she was glad the walls couldn’t talk. The crowd laughed in agreement — everyone, apparently, had a story they were glad those walls kept.
For the owners, preserving that character is the job. “We didn’t change it very much,” Johnson said, “but we did do a lot of cleaning.” He and his partners have already taken steps to protect the historical integrity of the building and say they intend to keep doing so. An effort is also underway to secure official historical recognition for the building from the Alabama Historical Commission.
What Manci’s is today
If you have somehow never been: Manci’s Antique Club offers excellent food, a broad beer, wine and cocktail list — including a Bloody Mary with a legendary local reputation — and a regular lineup of mostly local live music. The decor is less cluttered than it once was, but there is still plenty to catch the eye everywhere you look.
Just as important is what the place does for downtown Daphne. A century-old building anchoring the corner of Main and Belrose gives the city’s old town a gravity that new development cannot manufacture, and the bar draws a mix that spans generations: locals with deep roots in Daphne, Eastern Shore newcomers discovering it for the first time, and out-of-towners who wander in and instantly understand they have found something real.
Next door to history
The Manci building is not the only piece of the past on the block. Just to the south, a historical marker stands in front of the former Trione’s Store, the community’s first grocery, which opened in 1917 and later served as the bus depot and post office before more recently housing two side-by-side restaurants.
That lineage — a grocery in 1917, a corner bar in 1924, a city that did not incorporate until decades after both — is precisely what the anniversary crowd came to celebrate. In a stretch of the Gulf Coast rewriting itself at a dizzying pace, a hundred-year-old bar that still pours a legendary Bloody Mary, still books local musicians and still keeps its founders’ antiques on the walls is something close to a civic miracle.
“We’re blessed,” Williams said at the ceremony, thanking the three current owners for “keeping this spirit of community alive in this place.”
A hundred years down the road, Manci’s Antique Club has evolved while keeping its character — and with a centennial behind it and a historic designation in the works, the oldest building on Main Street looks set to keep serving Daphne for a very long time to come.