Frederick Fielder Jr. lived at and operated a cigar store at 939 Market Street in the late 1880s and early 1890s. The address was still a cigar store in 1924, when Francis Yost was in business at the address. A convenient address, across the street from the R.M. Hollingshead chemical factory and the 1933 repeal of Prohibition brought about a change in the usage of the building, and a liquor license was obtained.

In June of 1939, it was reported in the Camden Courier-Post that a John Stevenson received a liquor license renewal for the property. The 1947 directory also shows at the property. 

The 1954 New Jersey Bell Telephone Directory shows the bar as the Nine Thirty Nine Bar. The 1959 Directory shows  Pink Poodle Inc. conducting a bar at the address. Shortly thereafter Martin Baskow, who had previously conducted a vending machine business in East Camden, acquired the bar, which he operated with his wife Ella. Jaki Baskow, his daughter, states that the bar was still called the Nine Thirty Nine Bar as late as the summer of 1967, and news accounts of that time confirm this.. By that time, virtually all of the other business in the 900 block of Market Street had closed, in anticipation of the to-be-constructed interstate highway Route 676, which was completed in the 1980s. This construction would soon raze the Nine Thirty Nine Bar as well.

There is a traffic light at North 10th and Market Streets, but no building stands on the corner where the Nine Thirty Nine Bar once stood.

The proprietor of the Nine Thirty Nine Bar, Martin William Baskow, was brutally murdered in his bar on the morning of July 14, 1967. If you have any information concerning this crime, please e-mail me. Your identity will be kept confidential and there is a reward for information leading to an arrest.

Phil Cohen
June 26, 2006.