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A T-shirt captures the essence of Charleen Dexter. (Photo: Violet Ikonomova)
Update, 7:22 p.m. Wednesday: See a new video below, shot by Bronx customer Greg Bowens for Deadline Detroit.
The Bronx will lose a touch of sass today, when Charleen Dexter, who's worked at the Midtown bar since 1977, pours her final drink.
The Detroit Free Press reports that Dexter, 69, is retiring. And she knows it's a big deal.
“Nobody has worked any of these bars for almost 42 ... years,” says Dexter, inserting a profanity. “We can’t keep a cook for six months, much less 42 years.”
Dexter's take-no-shit attitude — and her years on the job — have made her a fixture in the local bar scene. She's been profiled multiple times by local media and was honored this summer with a tee shirt that showed her flipping the bird.
To close the curtain on Dexter's career, the Free Press enlisted the help of Ryan Hooper, who profiled the bartender several years ago in Hour Magazine.
She started as a 27-year-old single mother hoping the tips she made at the Bronx would support her three kids. Living across the street at the Sheridan Court apartments, she’d walk to work from her $120-a-month two-bedroom unit (rent in the same building today starts at $875).
Four decades later, she still lives a block away.
Bartender at the Bronx will likely be the last job title she’ll have.
Hooper reports that Dexter will miss the rotating cast of 20-somethings that stop by the bar, located just a short walk from the heart of the Wayne State University campus.
“I love talking to the kids,” says Dexter. “When I’m at home four days a week, I talk to very few people. So I come in here and I bulls--- with the kids, you know. I see these kids more than my grandkids.”
It's also a sign of change for the gentrifying neighborhood. The Bronx is no longer surrounded by the "pimp-and-hooker haven” that Dexter says the Cass Corridor used to be. But she says even though the area is now home to high-end shops and condos, and known by many as Midtown, for her, "it’s still the Cass Corridor.”
