Walking into Manci's is like walking back in time. The walls are covered in antiques, choochkies, bits and bobs. The largest collection in the building could be the Jim Beam decanter collection, which totals 500. All unique and collected by Buster Manci over several decades. Could it be the largest collection in the world? The current owners think it's possible.

Manci's Antique Club just celebrated a major milestone.

The business has had a constant presence in downtown Daphne and marked 88 years of business while the building turned 100 years old.

The exact start of Manci's Antique Club and when the Manci family got involved varies. Even partner Harry Johnson has heard differing accounts. One thing we do know is the year 1924 is on the building, and Harry Johnson (one of three partners in the business) said he believes the Manci family got involved in the building in 1936.

Buster and Tootsie Manci started the business and lived in the back. By all accounts, he was a bit of a collector and while the main business has been as a bar it served as a place for his treasures. Johnson said the bar was a private club "back in the day" and while there are many reasons there were private clubs, one was to sell alcohol on Sunday.

Over the years the bar was handed down in the Manci family, food was added to the menu, and it became a hub of activity for Daphne. In 2008, it was even featured in season four of the Food Network show "Diner's, Drive-Ins and Dives."

Johnson has been in the culinary world on the Alabama Gulf Coast since just after college. He has opened, closed, sold and brokered deals for years. That is how he ended up getting involved in Manci's.

In 2015, Manci's closed, sending shock waves through the community. Thankfully, it didn't close for good.

A photo of Alex Manci hangs at Manci’s Antique Club in downtown Daphne. The building is celebrating its 100th year of operation.

"The family called me wanting me to help them find a buyer for the business, the name and the contents," Johnson said. "I called John Thompson from Callaghan's over, and we got together and said let's do it together as a partnership."

Manci's started as a partnership of two, Johnson and Thompson, but they brought in Garrett DeLuca as a third.

For Johnson, the project of Manci's wasn't new. He purchased another iconic, but closed, restaurant many years before called Bluegill and breathed new life into it before selling. Thompson has built an iconic business, Callahan's, in Mobile that has a thriving music scene. DeLuca has been in the restaurant world since he was a teenager and brought his own experience and youthfulness to the mix.

Breathing new life into a relic isn't easy, and the first task was clearing out the collections without getting rid of the charm that is Manci's. An auction was held to sell off the majority of the treasure so the real work could begin. The boarded-up windows saw light, the main bar was opened up, and the room Buster's Brick Oven is located in — once just a storeroom full of collections — became a useful space.

"We had to clean it up and open it up. All the windows were boarded up inside and out. We didn't even know there were windows there. There was plywood everywhere," Johnson said.

With such a big project, some may opt to clear it out and start over, but that wasn't the case here. They wanted to make sure to preserve what made Manci's what it was.

"The name and the décor we had to keep," DeLuca said. "The décor goes hand in hand like the Jim Beam decanters and, of course, the fig leaf in the ladies' restroom."

The fun won't be spoiled in this article, but it gets everyone on their first visit.

Johnson said when revamping the business, they brought back live entertainment and revamped the food. Since taking over in 2015, the business has seen a steady increase and will hopefully stand as the local watering hole for another 88 years.

"A lot of people are like, 'This is my Cheers bar,' their local neighborhood bar," DeLuca said. "Almost everyone knows everybody's name. Don't get me wrong, we get a lot of out-of-towners, too, but I feel like 75% of people that come in regularly know their bartender's name and don't need a menu."

Don't worry, along with the fig leaf in the woman's bathroom, there is another surefire way to tell a newcomer.

"The ones that are looking up everything, those probably haven't been here before," Johnson said with a laugh.

A time capsule is something one typically peers into, but at Manci's Antique Club, you get to walk into history and all its quirkiness.

Manci's Antique Club is at 1715 Main St., Daphne. For more information, visit www.mancisantiqueclub.com.