JOCKO'S
ROCKET SHIP
We've been here since the space race.
We'll be here after you leave.
The Story
In 1961, a radio engineer named Ellsworth "Jocko" Pflugrath quit his job at WIBA after they wouldn't let him play the records he wanted. He took his severance, bought a condemned building on Gilman Street, and built a bar shaped like something from a fever dream—all angles and porthole windows and a neon rocket on the roof that still doesn't quite work right.
The Legend
They say Jocko built the place for the misfits—the night shift workers, the insomniacs, the people who didn't fit anywhere else in Madison. The academics who couldn't stop arguing. The musicians between gigs. The ones who needed a dark room and a stiff drink and nobody asking too many questions.
The Truth
Jocko died in '84. Heart gave out. Left the bar to his nephew who ran it into the ground, then to a silent partner nobody ever met. Changed hands twice more. The rocket's been rewired six times. The jukebox has a skip on "Blue Moon." We're still here. Make of that what you will.
✧ House Pours ✧
Hours
6am – Close, whenever that is
Closed Sundays. We need one day to mop.
Find Us
Madison, WI 53703
The one with the broken neon.