Gordon Shafrir insists it’s slow for a Wednesday as he taps his fingers against one of more than a dozen brand new, traditional wood picnic tables that form a grid sprawling across his bar’s large fenced-in outdoor patio.

He takes a sip from an icy neon drink, then holds the cup outward in offering. “Want to try this? We just switched to Hyphy, because they’re cheaper than Red Bull,” he says.

The latest co-owner of the infamous Eli’s Mile High Club in Oakland, Shafrir is young, good-looking and business-savvy well beyond his twenty-five years. He grew up fast, serving a string of line cook, food prep and chef jobs since his mid-teens, always saving the money he earned and looking out for himself.

Tonight Shafrir sits out back facing the doorway to the bar, one eye on the present and the other focused on the action inside. To his right the entire side of the fence has been artistically tagged, an acid trip of a mural loosely inspired by the city of Oakland set a mile high in the sky among the clouds. To his left, a middle-aged African American woman, a regular and a local from the neighborhood, flirtatiously calls out across the patio for Shafrir to come sit by her and chat. “Oh, come on, I wanna holler atcha. I won’t bite,” she insists. With that, Sharfrir gives in and excuses himself momentarily from the table in the name of customer service.

The bar is tucked between decaying mid-century apartment buildings and hidden beneath the shade of a Highway 24 overpass. This unassuming, single-story, mission-style structure stands proudly bearing the infamous Eli’s Mile High Club name. Just inside the deep red exterior, a deeper history resides inside the walls. Eli’s stands as a resilient force against gentrification, right in the heart of Oakland’s eerily desolate “ghost town” neighborhood beside the MacArthur BART station.

After surviving a near permanent closure in May, preceded by more than twenty-five years of hot-potato style changes in ownership, Shafrir and his business partner, music enthusiast Jason Herbers, now trade off running the day-to-day operations, determined to keep the club alive and thriving.

But their chance at Eli’s almost didn’t happen. After they were initially outbid on the club early this summer, Shafrir says he put the idea of buying a place on the back burner. That was until the bank unexpectedly called at the last minute with news that the previous buyers got cold feet and the place was up for bid again, asking Shafrir and Herbers if they still wanted it.

So on August 1, 2008, with the ink still wet on the lease forms, the guys wasted no time in reopening the club. “It was a functioning bar already,” says Shafrir. “Why keep it shut?”

With a big investment on their hands, they couldn’t afford to remodel without any revenue, so each Monday through Thursday before they open the doors at 5 p.m., they repaint, install, fix and rearrange the contents of Eli’s to make it their own. The changes come at a slow but steady pace. Since the buyout was a whirlwind, they’re now taking baby steps and learning as they go.

These days Herbers and Shafrir often clock in weekends from 10 a.m. to 3 a.m. Friday through Sunday. But the long hours are a labor of love and a trade-off that’s worth their while to be their own bosses, they insist.

The reinvention of the Mile High Club is a combined effort. The guys save money where they can. They employ friends, find used equipment, often trade favors for bar tabs and do most of the remodeling labor themselves. Originally brought on as a bar back, Dorian Wells says that he helps out wherever he can.

Well accustomed to the dive bar scene, Wells left his job at Pop’s on 24th and Bryant streets in the Mission just before his old friend Shafrir took over Eli’s. “I told Gordan I’d work for him when he got his own place,” he says, but he didn’t expect for it to all come together so soon.

Aside from the city of Oakland taking its sweet time in issuing the guys an official cabaret license to restart the tradition of live music at the Mile High Club, problems have been few and minor, and things have been running smoothly despite the neighborhood’s sketchy reputation. And while they cut corners in spending where they can, Shafrir and Herbers are strict when it comes to checking I.D.s and hosting special events because they don’t want to give authorities any reason to bust them. They’re giving this place everything they’ve got and they are not about to lose it on little things or carelessness.

While plans for the new and improved Eli’s Mile High Club include a New Orleans theme in mind for menu and décor with live, local rock-and-roll at night, little reminders of the original will remain throughout the club. Like the framed copy of the East Bay Express dated June 1, 1979 that tells the story of Eli’s death at the hands of his jealous blues-singing mistress. And the tiles on the bar, arranged in patterns of red, white and blue so that every drink served slides over the red tiles spelling out “Eli’s Mile High.” And the old jukebox filled with blues and jazz 45s, found in the very back of the storage shed that now sits near the entrance, glowing like a prop from the 1970s era Price Is Right set.

Unlike previous owners, the guys are not trying to recreate the old blues club, but to create something that is their own, inspired by the ambiance and hospitality of the South that Elijah Thornton originally infused into the turn of the century building. Today’s generation of Mile High owners share a passion and enthusiasm for keeping Eli’s basic traditions alive: serving up stiff drinks, soul food and good tunes under the same roof.