Bonner’s Irish Pub has a history dating back to 1894. It may soon be something else entirely.

When Danny Bonner bought his eponymous pub 30 years ago, it was one more aging Irish bar in Center City. By 1994, the corner bar at 23rd and Sansom had been operating for a century, and had changed hands enough times that much of its legend and lore had long ago faded into the bar smoke. There were bygone tales of 19th century brawls and Gilded Age dancing girls. Bawdy yarns of bathtub booze and stricken barmen. There was the day a president stopped by for lunch — and a ghost was said to hurl pots in the kitchen.

Bonner’s had seen better days.

“It was on the skids, really,” recalls Bonner.

Bonner brought new life to the old pub. Soon, new regulars — including, for a time, me — discovered the scruffy charms of the bar that sits like a village inn in the shadows of the Walnut Street Bridge. In recent years, as the neighborhood grew ritzy, and the pandemic shuttered more than a few nearby spots, Bonner’s found itself one of the last Irish pubs standing in its corner of Center City.

Now, the old pub with staying power may soon be built into something wholly new.

In February, Bonner listed the three-story building for sale. The asking price is $6 million. He is seeking a partner to develop the property, possibly into a boutique hotel. A sleeker Bonner’s could be built in the lobby, he said.

“Like a little cocktail lounge,” he said. “It would still carry on.”

Smoking a cigarette outside the pub on a recent afternoon, Bonner said the time to develop was right. He pointed out some of the gleaming high-rises and townhomes that have transformed the blocks around the Schuylkill River Trail.

“We’re not in the low-rent district anymore, my friend,” he said.

Thirty years ago, Bonner bought the building for a little over $222,000. A lifelong barman originally from West Philadelphia, Bonner built up a new customer base. Penn and Drexel students, troop members from the historic 23rd Street Armory, and postal workers from the now shuttered 30th Street Post Office. And soon, the newer arrivals to the neighborhood. As the stools filled, he renovated the place, expanding the barroom and sprucing up the dining rooms.

Bonner’s has had many lives. All of them whiskey-fueled. A proprietor named Andrew Smith first opened a pub on the property in 1894, according to 19th century newspaper articles. His new pub sat in a working-class neighborhood one block from the Schuylkill. The gleaming Baltimore & Ohio Railroad station, designed by Frank Furness, had opened down the street. The pub’s name may be lost to time, but its alleged shenanigans are not.

Just two years after opening its doors, a neighbor, Frank Brady, pleaded with City Hall to yank the pub’s liquor license. In a two-day hearing, which made for colorful newsprint, Brady exhausted the court’s patience by reading from a list of complaints.

“Drunken men had gone into the saloon and came out still drunker,” Brady fumed. Come Saturdays, “workingmen with large families drank all the time until they were paralyzed,” he said. “All the customers were bad characters,” he said, huffing about one man “who had not drawn a sober breath for a year.” Women drank there too, he griped.

“He said he saw two men accompanied by girls go into the place beastly drunk, and the girls were dancing the ‘Can-Can,’” a reporter noted.

In true Philly fashion, Smith may have had friends in high places. He kept his license after a steady stream of beat cops and even the superintendent of a nearby home for inebriates refuted Brady’s claims, pointing out that despite his remonstrations he had once been a regular customer himself.

By the 1920s, the bar had a new name: Connors’. Frank Connors was an Irish immigrant and World War I veteran who bought the bar with money earned working as a maitre d’ at the Union League, said his grandson, Stephen Kane.

“He got off the boat and worked the kitchens until he had enough,” said Kane.

His grandfather was a dapper man who wore a diamond tiepin and carried a can with a hidden gun built inside it, Kane said. He treated regulars like family, and made sure everyone had enough to drink during Prohibition (the bar served whiskey distilled in a nearby rowhouse, the legend goes).

Connors died in 1945. According to family lore, he suffered a heart attack while fighting a bartender whom he found stealing booze from the basement.

“He saw that liquor bottles were missing, and found a secret sliding door,” Kane said. “He blew a gasket.”

For years, Connors’ wife, Mary, and their three daughters ran things. Kane’s mom, Catherine, liked to tell about how when Franklin Roosevelt addressed 100,000 supporters at Franklin Field, his sharpshooters set up on the bar roof. Afterward, the riflemen plopped down for hot roast beef sandwiches and mugs of beer.

“She always said they were well-dressed, they were gentlemen, and they were good tippers,” Kane said.

The bar would exchange hands a few more times — and be owned by a member of the Cavanaugh bar dynasty, who still operate three pubs in Philly — when a president strolled in. Jimmy Carter was down in the polls in 1980 when he stopped in for lunch with Mayor Bill Green while campaigning in Philly.

“He wanted an authentic Philly Irish bar experience,” said Tom Leonard, who was city controller at the time, and lunched on platters of corn beef and cabbage with Carter.

“He wasn’t a big drinker,” said Leonard. “He may have ordered a glass of beer just to toast it, but he left very happy. He enjoyed it.”

For years, the room was known as the “President’s Room” and was decorated with framed portraits of presidents.

Bonner has been telling nervous customers that a potential sale does not mean the end of the bar.

“It will be a new chapter,” he says.

Regulars, like Max Kneis, 28, a second year student at Wharton, are glad to hear it. Kneis first discovered Bonner’s as a member of the school’s hockey club, which fills the bar after every practice and game (the same goes for the school’s rugby and soccer clubs).

He doesn’t want to imagine the bar not being around, he said, as longtime bartender Cathi Brennan served him up a pint.

“This is one of the last true watering holes in the neighborhood,” he said. “We don’t want it to go anywhere.”