The Watering Hole
The Watering Hole is a bar in Downtown Zootopia, on the corner of Pack and Trip. It is where the crew from the Downtown Snarlbucks drinks after close, and the first place Pawbert spends an evening with mammals who are not his pack. An unrelated transit station, the Animalia Line terminus in Savanna Central, carries the same name.
Description
The bar is on a side street a short walk from the Downtown Snarlbucks, on a block of older storefronts: a laundromat, a bodega, a repair shop with neon in its windows. Its entrance is a single door between a tailor and a used bookstore, marked with a wooden sign carrying the name. Pack Street and Trip Street, which give the corner its address, also name adjacent stops on the Downtown transit line.
Inside is one warm, worn room. The furniture is mismatched and pushed into clusters rather than laid out in rows, scuffs cover the floor and scratches the bar top, and the lighting sits lower than it needs to be. A bar runs the length of one wall, its bottles lit from behind. A jukebox in the corner plays soft jazz and old ballads, little of it recent. Framed photographs cover the walls, most of them faded and most of them strangers, caught celebrating or grieving or doing nothing in particular, hung among concert posters and a map of Zootopia stuck with pins in no pattern anyone has explained. The room smells of coffee and cooking. Nothing in it looks designed; it has the accumulated look of somewhere that has simply stayed open a long time.
Service is unhurried and scaled to the customer. A hippo who has worked bars for decades takes orders without recognition or small talk. Coffee is served alongside drinks, appetizers arrive in baskets, and measures are poured down to thimble size for the smallest patrons. The tables sit close enough that a conversation at one carries to the next.
History
Season 4
Lane first names the place at the end of Pawbert's trial shift in "Tips": a few of the crew go there after close, and Pawbert would be welcome any time. Pawbert says he will think about it and stays home instead. Nobody has invited him anywhere since before prison.
Lane renews the offer weeks later in "Radio Silence", on the fourth day of Luther's unexplained absence, catching Pawbert stretching out his closing tasks to keep from looking at his phone. Pawbert puts the question to the pack by text, is told to go, and agrees to one hour. Brim backs the pitch with a flat endorsement of the food and the pour. On the walk over, Lane explains that the crew has been coming for about two years, that the place is nothing fancy, and that nobody there minds what anyone has done.
The corner table that night holds Lane, Brim, Tara and a raccoon from the shop's largest counter; a pangolin who works mornings at a different Snarlbucks branch joins later. A deer at the next table places Pawbert from the news and says so loudly enough to be heard. Lane answers that Pawbert makes good coffee and that nothing else counts in the room, and the table lets it drop. Anyone who starts something with Pawbert here, Lane tells him afterward, starts it with all of them. Later the same night Pawbert notices Mika drawing alone one table over, and Lane waves her across. She reads the waiting on him inside a few sentences. Worry never reaches the mammal it is aimed at, she tells him, and cannot be switched off regardless; distraction does not speed anyone's return, only makes the wait survivable. She leaves him the address of her studio. He stays far longer than the hour he agreed to, and walks to the transit station afterward without taking his phone out.
He comes back in "The Apron Incident", on an afternoon Luther, still recovering from broken ribs, tells him to take for himself. The hippo takes his order as a customer and nothing else, which lands on him as a relief. Asked how he is, he tells the table that his partner was hurt on a job, and names Luther to them aloud for the first time; Brim, who has never met the wolf, diagnoses control issues and is correct. Mika arrives with her sketchbook and announces that they are all going on to her studio. Sitting in the middle of the conversation, Pawbert works out that these mammals know his conviction and his family name and have set both aside. He has friends outside the pack.
The bar outlasts the job. When his last shift ends in "Full Circle", Lane sends him off by naming the two places the crew can be found: here, and Mika's studio.
Season 5
By "Pattern Recognition" Pawbert is off the Snarlbucks schedule, and the bar is the standing meeting point of the friend group. Word that his post-release supervision has ended reaches Lane through what he calls the Watering Hole grapevine, routed from Mika by way of Tara; Brim reports having tried to map how information moves through it and failed. Tara proposes a proper celebration there that weekend, and Lane claims Saturday before anyone can offer an alternative. Renny, a musician who joined the group at one of the bar's nights some eight months earlier, has a gig booked there for the following month and a song he is trying to finish before it.
Notable Events
- Lane invites Pawbert after his trial shift, the first time anyone has asked him anywhere since before prison
- Pawbert's first visit falls on the fourth day of Luther's absence, on a one-hour agreement he abandons
- A patron recognizes him from the news; Lane deflects it and commits the crew to him
- Pawbert meets Mika at the next table and is offered her studio
- He names Luther to the crew as his partner, and recognizes that he has friends outside the pack
- Lane names the bar and the studio as where to find the crew after Pawbert's last shift
- News of the end of Pawbert's supervision reaches the crew through the bar's grapevine
- Renny books a gig at the bar