
Go-go dancers, whiskey sours, and the revitalization of a unique Philly bar.
Inconspicuous in jeans and a black sweatshirt bleached by lemon juice, Josette Bonafino C’89 walked through Philadelphia’s Callowhill neighborhood under a starry October night and slipped into the darker confines of the Trestle Inn.
She ordered a beer and walked past black curtains, into a back room where red lanterns gave off a somber hue and a mirrored ball was still above the dance floor. When a DJ started playing a cover of the Bee Gees song “More Than a Woman,” and the lights began spinning, people filed in from front to back, ready to dance for hours. Bonafino sat at a high-top table off to the side, eyes fixed on the empty go-go boxes on the stage.
That’s when Bonafino started worrying. After all, she owns the corner bar at 11th and Callowhill Streets.
“OK, it’s 10 o’clock, where are the dancers?” she said to no one in particular.
Bonafino, 57, was a dual major at Penn, studying communications and urban studies. She said class trips through up-and-coming Philly neighborhoods, like Northern Liberties, with Weitzman School of Design lecturer Paul Levy and Professor of Social Policy and History Mark Stern, were influential. The University didn’t teach Bonafino how to wipe down bar tops or mop up spilled bourbon—but she brings her education to the bar business daily.
“I essentially studied liberal arts and like to think what Penn taught me, most of all, is how to communicate and navigate the world. Penn taught me how to go out there and continue to learn,” she said a few weeks earlier inside an empty Trestle Inn. “There’s still this connection to urban studies too, seeing the growth of the city as an organism, and all of the things happening here in this neighborhood. I’m a part of that now.”
Stern later brought his urban studies students to Callowhill, a neighborhood that was also on the rebound at the turn of the new millennium. Bonafino would invite any Penn student 21 or over into the Trestle for a drink during those tours.
“She was in my Intro to Urban Research class,” Stern recalled. “I’m not sure what exactly she took away from the class, but overall, the curriculum focused on the importance of space and place and how cities function. It seems like she understood something implicitly about contributing life to neighborhoods because that’s what she’s done.”
After graduation, Bonafino took a different path than many of her classmates, working at a nightclub in Delaware County, and then flirting with the idea of film school in California. Bonafino didn’t think she could be part of the Hollywood machine, so she went to New York, briefly, before heading back to Philly, where she was born and raised. “I’m an East Coaster,” she said. “All my family’s here.”
After New York, Bonafino became an entrepreneur, using her Ivy League education and ingrained Philly hustle to craft a handful of careers. She worked in publishing for a few years, then started an educational tour business called Culture Quest Tours, taking high school and college students to Europe, until the September 11 attacks derailed international travel. Troubled by the anti-Muslim sentiment poisoning the country at the time, Bonafino started a nonprofit, MYX: Multicultural Youth eXchange, that promoted multiculturalism and social responsibility to children through art. She brought that program into the School District of Philadelphia from 2006 to 2012.
One day, around 2004, Bonafino and her husband, Ian Cross, drove down Callowhill Street and saw a large “For Sale” sign at the former J & J Trestle Inn, a longtime go-go lounge. Dancers gyrated in g-strings and pasties there, mostly for neighborhood factory workers nursing beers before trudging back home. The bar used to host contests for certain body parts, front and back, and signs asked patrons to keep their hands off the women.
Bonafino recalls thinking the Trestle needed a facelift, that it was held up by “bubblegum and toothpicks.” She and Cross were real estate investors too, mostly flipping condominiums, but the Trestle was a new challenge and the neighborhood—which has been called the Loft District, North Chinatown, Callowhill, and the “Eraserhood,” after former resident David Lynch—was alluring. “We thought it was a diamond in the rough,” she said. “It came with a liquor license and that was just intriguing. And we had no fear back then. We thought we could do it, so we gave it a shot.”
Levy recalled Bonafino taking his class “Urban Redevelopment: From Roosevelt to Bush” because the syllabus included a “weekend day bus tour of development projects in Philadelphia.” Levy, board chair of the Center City District, said the class has come full circle because he’s now working on projects with the elevated Reading Viaduct Rail Park, which has an entrance about 20 yards from the Trestle. “It’s a classic situation there,” Levy said of the Callowhill neighborhood. “You have the remnants of the former working-class area, the growth of Chinatown, and then artists moved in.”
Along with a $420,000 bar and liquor license, Bonafino and Cross also inherited a tenant: the go-go act. At first, they were unsure what to do with it. “This was like a throwback to the ’70s. It was more like strip go-go,” she said. “It was fascinating, visually and culturally, but I didn’t want to operate that type of business.”
The Trestle actually needed full reconstructive surgery, Bonafino and Cross later learned. There was a popcorn drop ceiling that had to come out, layer after layer of dingy carpeting, and a mind-boggling number of electrical cords snaking through the building. Bonafino wondered how it hadn’t burned down when, in June of 2010, a three-alarm fire tore through the property, temporarily halting their plans.

Today, the Trestle still looks unassuming, but its gritty, brick facade belies a chic, candlelit minimalism inside. There are no televisions on the walls, and no jukeboxes or video games to pull patrons’ attention from one another. A projector cast old clips of “Soul Train” on a wall, not college football. The cocktails, like the bar’s famous whiskey sour, are mostly classics. Bonafino and Cross said it’s all analog by design. They even kept the “Trestle” name all on account of the vintage sign out front.
“The sign was legendary,” she said. “We feel passionate about not destroying the character of buildings in the city. We wanted to maintain that, and if you have the outside, the inside has to speak to that.”
That’s one reason why Bonafino also decided to keep a (less salacious) version of go-go. In college, Bonafino was a member of the Penn Dance Company, where she focused on breath-driven movement and techniques that had “dramatic and expressive qualities.”
“Movement has always been important to me,” she said.
On that Saturday night in October, one of the Trestle’s go-go dancers, CeCe Summers, made her way to the box a few minutes past 10 p.m. Bonafino stopped worrying, for a minute or two. Summers wore a sequined skirt, her movements attuned to the DJ. It was clear, early on, that she was the hardest worker in the room, pausing from time to time to wipe some sweat from her brow.
“We have auditions for this and we only accept trained dancers. She’s working hard up there. They are athletes,” Bonafino said at the table that night. “There’s not a lot of places left where you’ll see anything like this.”
—Jason Nark CGS’07