About J's

Generations in,
and the room still fills up.

A short account of who's behind the bar, who was behind it before, and why this corner of N Oates has stuck around when most places like it didn't.

Homer and Janice Starling behind the bar at J's Landing
Homer and Janice behind the bar, most nights for decades.

It started with a mother and her daughter.

Long before most of Dothan's bars existed, this one was already a family affair. Janice and her mother opened the doors and ran it together, the start of something that has outlasted just about everything around it.

Then Homer stood right alongside them.

Janice married Homer Starling, and Homer poured himself into this place beside the family, behind the bar well into his eighties. Over the years they ran more than one room, but the family settled here at 768 N Oates Street, and here it has stayed.

Most bars don't have the family running the thing, for decades, inside the thing. This one always has.
Homer and Janice dancing at J's Landing
Homer and Janice, dancing in their own room.

Janice still keeps the room.

Decades on, Janice is still here, still opening the room, still closing it, still keeping it the kind of place that doesn't really exist anymore, not in Dothan and honestly not in most towns. Across the generations, the family never walked away from it.

The oldest bar in Dothan.

That makes J's Landing the oldest bar in Dothan, Alabama, practically a local landmark at this point. It never needed a website; it grew by word of mouth, a regular bringing a friend, a friend bringing a band, a band bringing a crowd. But a story like this is worth writing down once, for whoever walks in someday and wonders. The rest of the site is just for getting you through the door.