When Accordion Club closed, earlier this year, it left Durham bereft of one of its most essential dive bars—the kind of place where regulars knew which stool was theirs, where bathroom selfies had their own dedicated Instagram account, where a hot dog from a roller behind the bar tasted transcendent. The kind of place where you might run into two different exes on a first date, where trying to order a mojito got you a raised eyebrow.
The kind of place, in other words, that a city needs. Filling the void it left was essential. But Accordion would be a hard act to follow.
Which may be why Connor Gunipero, Josh Goodsell, and Zach Wooldridge aren’t trying to deviate too far from what came before. The three owners of The Old North Bar, which opened in September in the former Accordion space at 316 West Geer Street, are leaning into legacy.
“A Bull City classic—renewed, renovated and ready to be rediscovered,” Old North’s website reads, stating even more plainly down the page: “Some things never change.”
Over the past two years, Accordion’s hours had gotten increasingly sporadic. The INDY was unable to reach owner Scott Richie to learn why he decided to shutter the space in the spring. The Old North team, however, feels confident about the new bar’s prospects.
“We’re doing a bunch of work to make this very geared towards tight margins, which we’re all very comfortable with,” Gunipero says.
The owners met each other a few years back. Goodsell and Wooldridge bonded over card games at an estate sale—Wooldridge was hustling sports cards, Goodsell was dealing Magic: The Gathering. Goodsell and Gunipero connected when Gunipero was bartending at The Crunkleton in Chapel Hill around the same time. Goodsell was a regular who “actually ordered good whiskey,” Gunipero says.
When the opportunity to take over the Accordion space arose, Goodsell pitched the idea to the two others, who had never met. They jumped at it. The three brought complementary skills: Wooldridge, a Durham native, owns his own electrical contracting company; Gunipero spent 15 years bartending in New York City before his five-year stint at The Crunkleton; and Goodsell has been in the restaurant industry for over two decades and owns Chapel Hill bar The Gathering Place and pizzeria Alpha Pie.
Their main goal was for the space to continue being a neighborhood bar that everyone can afford. They’ve kept draft beers between $5 and $8 (the cheapest option is $5 for a 20 oz PBR), cans and bottles from $3 to $6, and classic cocktails in the $9 to $12 range. On Mondays, all beer cans and bottles are $1 off.
To pull off those prices, the trio made a series of deliberate choices. First, they took no outside investors.
“We’re not beholden to anyone but ourselves,” Gunipero says.
They also leveraged industry knowledge to source quality spirits at lower costs. North Carolina’s government-controlled liquor pricing works in their favor: “If you have the palate for it, you can get a much cheaper bottle that’s a much better distillate” than what the market hype suggests you should be using, Gunipero says.
And they made decisive calls about what to spend on and what to skip. They wanted to keep hot dogs in-house like Accordion had, but when the health department said they’d need about $80,000 in renovations to maintain a food permit, they pivoted. Instead, they’ve partnered with Greg Poole from Hawk Dogs, who runs a cart outside Thursday through Sunday, 6 p.m. to midnight. Poole’s menu rotates—sometimes there are burgers and fries—and his wife occasionally shows up with slices of homemade sweet potato pie ($3.50) and vegetables from their garden (free).
On the design side, the owners kept the bones but gave things a refresh. They re-sanded and refinished the bar, stripping off “a nice thick layer of grime.” They added booth seating inside, where a pool table and pinball machine once stood, and expanded seating out back, as well—though Accordion’s trademark Chinese lanterns did come down in the process. After some debate, they repainted the graffiti-covered bathroom walls (people are welcome to re-graffiti them, the owners say). And they added new shelves behind the bar, made from red oak by a father-and-son duo they found on Facebook Marketplace, who Wooldridge says “just kind of had a mill at their house.”
Much of the bar’s decor came from similarly eclectic channels. One memorable trip sent Gunipero out to Apex to pick up a vintage sign. When he arrived, a shirtless child stood in the driveway with a bow and arrow drawn.
“I had to get out of the car and be like, ‘I think I’m here to see your dad,’” Gunipero recalls. “And he lowered the bow.”
The organizing principle for everything on the walls is a sense of place: there’s a Flying Dog neon sign from one of the old Sam’s Quik Shop locations; a 1950s accordion, as a wink to their predecessor; and a cow skull from Gunipero’s family farm—a nod to Durham without leaning too hard into Bull City branding, which Wooldridge says has gotten “a little bit redundant.”
The bar’s name is a nod to North Carolina’s state toast (“Cheers to the Old North State”) and to the neighborhood the bar sits in, Old North Durham. On the side of the building, the owners painted the words “Old North Durham,” deliberately leaving off “bar” to make it feel more like a neighborhood marker than a business sign.
“Durham, at this point, feels like it’s in a flux of, what is this town really gonna be?” says Wooldridge. “A lot of what my opinion of downtown is right now is ‘other shit that got transplanted here that doesn’t make sense.’ We wanted a place that was a Durham place.”
“There’s a pride in being from Durham,” Wooldridge continues. “It’s kind of hard to describe what it is. But if you’re from here and you’ve lived here for a long time, there is a pride in being from here.”
Follow Staff Writer Lena Geller on Bluesky or email [email protected]. Comment on this story at [email protected].