any comments high life?

Hey, you. Quit smiling over there. You got nothing to smile about."

This is yelled through the few teeth of a pony-tailed man and flutters for a moment, suspended on the din and dim-lighted chatter of the moment only to be absorbed into what are the last days and hours of the National Liquor Bar.

The joke may as well have been for all Milwaukee.

That's because the space, at 2601 W. National Ave., which has operated as a tavern since 1939 and expanded to its current warehouse size in the 1940s, will make its last call Saturday at 6 p.m.

Hard by the tanneries and three-shift manufacturing plants that powered the city for generations, the place lent affordable fraternity to the working men and women whose fortunes rose and fell along the arc of the city's industrial experience, who waited in lines to cash their checks at the tavern's ticket booth and who spent a portion of their wages there on the drink at the racetrack-shaped mahogany bar.