David `Turk' McNeil, 94, bartender whose career mirrored the post-Harlem Renaissance

David “Turk” McNeil, 94, a self-described connoisseur of fine wines, good food, and beautiful women, and a bartender who moved easily in the world of nightclubs and music spawned by Harlem’s Renaissance, died of kidney failure on New Year’s Day at Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena, Calif.

The Harlem Renaissance was an explosion of culture including jazz that was brought northward by African Americans in the 1920s and ’30s as they left the South. Mr. McNeil, who was growing up at that time, benefited. By the time he came along to start a career tending bar in Philadelphia in the 1940s, jazz clubs were common. His career culminated in the Harlem clubs of the 1950s and 1960s, including the famous Blue Note.

Love of jazz was part of Mr. McNeil’s DNA, he wrote on his blog. If the great bandleader Count Basie was performing at a club, he went and took his daughter, Davida Siwisa James.

“He was [part] of a generation that saw the start and pinnacle of the Jazz Era,” James said.

While he kept an apartment at the Pavilion in Wynnefield for many years, he also lived in Los Angeles and Mexico, where he followed the bullfights. Since 2011, he had retired to his daughter’s home in California.

“I consider myself – first and foremost – a New Yorker, having spent some of the happiest and most rewarding years of my life there during a historic period for music and the civil rights movement. But I am a born and bred Philadelphian,” he wrote on his blog in 2011.

He mingled with friends who occupied the bar stools in Harlem because “Turk was working that night,” his daughter said. The crowded nightclubs typically had a bar in front, a few tables in the middle, and space for a small jazz band.

“You never knew who might pop in to jam,” his daughter said.

Singers such as Billie Holiday and Nina Simone performed at clubs he frequented, and afterward, showed up at the swank parties he threw at his Harlem apartment, his daughter said.

At a time when segregation sharply curtailed the activities of minorities, he refused to limit himself. He enjoyed fine dining and the theater.

“In an era when few African Americans could, he was taking Scandinavian cruises where people dressed elegantly for dinner,” his daughter said.

Born in North Philadelphia, he was the son of Joseph and Hattie Berry McNeil. He attended public school through the eighth grade and learned bartending on the job.

Mr. McNeil and Ernestine Haggans had Davida James, his only daughter, in 1953. The two did not marry. Haggans died in 1968. He married Ivy Dunbar in the early 1970s and they divorced. She survives.

In retirement, he began writing poetry reflecting on his life, including the following, which he published online on Feb. 28, 2012:

For Lonzo

Say! Listen to this, if you have the time, it’s about a longtime friend of mine.

I never could describe this guy, not that I haven’t tried

Though he was small in structure, his character was wide.

At least I always thought so, but I’ve been wrong before

So, I’ll tell you all about him, and you can keep the score.

He tried his hand at everything he thought would make a buck.

But catching colds and missing trains just seemed to be his luck.

Now don’t misunderstand me, things were not always slow,

He always kept a neat wardrobe, could always make a show.

Popular dude with all the guys, the dolls spoke of him well,

Never disrespected the ladies, no punching after the bell.

He knew that in the jungle, that’s what he called this life,

Not only watch the stranger, cause your pals all had a knife.

In addition to his daughter, he is survived by a grandson and two great-grandsons.

Plans for services were pending.