Holmes Beer Garden Tavern (Bucket of Blood) (Allison and 40th Streets)

Holmes Beer Garden Tavern, infamously known as the Bucket of Blood, was located on Allison and 40th Streets and was owned and operated by Frank Holmes. The tavern got its nickname and reputation “due to the numerous fights that took place there after the baseball games.” 

Valgene Banks remembers the infamous legacy of Holmes beer garden:

Mr. Holmes, yeah, a lot of people really liked to go down there, too, because, well, this time of year you could be sitting out. But he had a tall fence up, and you could sit out in the yard and still people passing by couldn’t see you drinking your beer or whatever. Yeah, they called it the “Bucket of Blood,” I think, because they would have fights down there. But everybody seemed to run down [to] the Bucket of Blood for some reason. And he just had like a music box, you know, that played up in there.

Arthur Dock remembers Holmes’s fondly:

Oh my, that was always full of fun. We could go down there–I was a little older then–and they used to have Gunther beer, big bumpers. We would collect the pennies we had, and there was always two or three people would buy us a bumper. We would go up on Branch Hill and pass the bottle around, and everyone take a sip until it was all gone!

Sources

https://pgaamcc.org/digitalfootsteps/