Bernie Mac Lived Above Paddy’s Pub from ‘It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’ on His Sitcom
Raising three kids is hard enough when you don’t have five psychopaths downstairs screaming about spiders and hanging dong.
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Much like how Rob McElhenney continues to extoll the virtues of his hometown of Philadelphia while flying around the world with his buddy Ryan Reynolds and running soccer teams in Wales, the late, great comedian Bernard “Bernie Mac” McCullough was one of Chicago’s greatest advocates — often from afar.
Born and raised on Chicago’s South Side, Mac took his comedy talents across the country with the Original Kings of Comedy, alongside his fellow stand-ups Steve Harvey, D.L. Hughley and Cedric the Entertainer, and eventually settled in Los Angeles to film five seasons of the critically acclaimed sitcom The Bernie Mac Show between 2001 and 2006. In the series, Mac and his on-screen wife, played by Kellita Smith, struggled but succeeded to raise Mac’s fictional sister’s three kids with a parenting philosophy based on the title star’s stand-up act.
But as one It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia fan revealed in the show’s subreddit, Mac’s old apartment on The Bernie Mac Show, which was briefly shown in an exterior shot, is conveniently situated above a certain Philadelphia pub whose bouncer and sheriff would be over the moon to see his establishment called a “church.”
The building that’s currently best known for being the exterior of Paddy’s Pub on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is actually a converted factory in the Arts District of downtown Los Angeles that many sitcom-makers have used to to convey a dingy, derelict charm over the last 20-plus years, according to the above screenshot from The Bernie Mac Show.
The Nate Starkman & Son Building, or the “Starkman Building,” is so named for a record label that inhabited it in the 1980s, and it’s currently a far cry from the paint factory that the original structure contained at the turn of the 20th century — though the fish factory briefly brought back that industrial atmosphere before Dee screwed it up.
There’s something sweet and melancholic about the idea that one building in Los Angeles was able to give two TV greats an in-universe home-away-from-home when the real-life stars and creators presumably couldn’t convince their L.A.-based bosses to give their more Middle-American cities the spotlight for a change. Still, both Bernie Mac and Mac McDonald managed to make L.A. feel like home while staying true to their faith.
As the saying goes, through God, all things are possible, so jot that down.
