The Uptown Bar and Grill in Oakland launched this exploration of “Uptown.”  So, once again, a tangent off of a tangent.

The musical selection is obvious, even inevitable.  I don’t care for the song, but that is not relevant.  It is the choice.  And a fantastic video.  Click the album.

Runner up:

I don’t know this song.  The video is pretty wild in a 1982 kind of way.

Uptown – it conjures up a lot.  It is a cool word, and it had the advantage of not having been a song sung by Petula Clark.

In old-school slang, “uptown” meant cocaine.  Heroin was “downtown.”  Not as classy.  Leaving aside drugs, it is a name that is hard to resist when naming.

When I showed these photos to my friend, he launched into stories about his childhood in Detroit.

They had a local soda manufactured by Faygo Beverages.  The company started out as the Feigenson Brothers Bottling Works.  In 1921 they Americanized and shortened it to Faygo.

One of their sodas was a lemon-lime beverage named “Uptown.”

He remembered the soda with fondness, and a local cartoon show created by the company named the Faygo Kid with even more fondness.  The Faygo Kid guarded the Wells Fargo Express.  The evil Black Bart was intent on robbing the stagecoach of its precious cargo, a case of Faygo Root Beer.

The cartoon was shown on some of my friend’s favorite shows – Sagebrush Shorty, Cowboy Colt, and Auntie Dee.  Good memories!

It got him talking about a visit to Detroit soon.  Not that he has family left there, but there is a neighborhood he wants to check out.

Good.  Fine.  What about all the uptown photos?