Was Toots Shor, the saloon-restaurant at 51 W. 51st St., real? Or was it dreamed up as a place for Tony Curtis’s Sidney Falco to meet with Burt Lancaster’s J.J. Hunsecker in “Sweet Smell of Success”? Was there really once a place in the 1940s and ’50s where Babe Ruth, Humphrey Bogart, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Sinatra, Walter Cronkite, Mike Wallace, Sugar Ray Robinson, Mickey Mantle, Joe Louis , John Wayne, Jack Dempsey, Richard Nixon, Jackie Gleason, Yogi Berra, Earl Warren, and Frank Costello actually rubbed elbows with my father and his friends?

Yes, there was, but something about it seems unreal. “Toots,” the endearing and invigorating 85-minute documentary about Bernard “Toots” Shor and his iconic establishment by his granddaughter, Kristi Jacobson, is a time capsule from a world so far removed from our own that it scarcely seems possible that many of the people who lived in it are still here to talk about it. Fortunately, many of them are — Messrs. Cronkite and Wallace, Pete Hamill, Frank Gifford, Whitey Ford, Gay Talese, and many others are available to pass along anecdotes, real and apocryphal; and fortunately for Ms. Jacobson, she had access to films of some who are gone, like Sinatra and Gleason, captured back in 1975 by a Columbia University researcher named Edward Robb Ellis. Mr. Ellis also recorded some of Toots’s reminiscences; about 18 months later, Shor succumbed to cancer. Utilizing film clips, still photographs, and video segments from TV shows (such as Toots’s featured appearance on “This Is Your Life”), Ms. Jacobson has reconstructed the heart of New York nightlife between World War II and the Vietnam era.

If Toots (short for Tootsie — his aunt loved his baby curls) had not existed, no one could have invented him. He learned to grow up tough. A Jew in a predominantly Italian-Irish section of South Philadelphia, he lost his mother at age 15 to an automobile accident and a few years later, his father to suicide. His uncle, so the legend goes, told him he was a bum, and Bernard split for New York to prove him wrong.

He got in with a good crowd that included Damon Runyan and his friends, and eventually ended up working for Owney “The Killer” Madden, a mobster so legendary that he actually appeared in the last chapter of Herbert Asbury’s “The Gangs of New York.” He worked as a bouncer in speakeasies and did the work well. “One night,” he said in the Ellis interviews, “I flattened a Revenue guy.” That was his ticket to mob support. “He knew all the mob guys,” Mr. Gifford tells Ms. Jacobson. “He liked them, and why not? They gave him the opportunity to become Toots Shor.”

In 1940, Toots opened his restaurant-saloon with its famous circular bar. In the postwar euphoria, it became the ultimate male hangout. The magnet was Toots’s own good-natured, rough-hewn personality. “He called everyone a crumb-bum,” Whitey Ford says. “Everyone was a crumb bum. ‘How ya doin’, crumb-bum?’ “His insults, in the words of the late David Halberstam, allowed celebrities “to shed some of the burden of their fame and relax — while being treated as VIPs.” It also allowed businessmen from New Jersey, sons of immigrants, to mingle with more famous sons of immigrants, like Rocky Marciano and Joe DiMaggio.

Shor defined his era so perfectly that he could never really fit comfortably in another. The golden age came to an end in 1959 when he sold his lease to a developer. Two years later he opened a larger place on 52nd Street, but to purists it was a silver age and never quite as satisfying. The music changed — Sinatra was still cool, but no longer hip — and the athletes got a lot richer; some, like Joe Namath, opened their own restaurants. “How can you sit down and have a drink,” asks Peter Duchin, “with a guy who gets eight million dollars for hitting a baseball?”

“People were happier then,” Mr. Talese says. Those of us who grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, I think, instinctively want to reject that idea — what people were happier? The swells were at Shor’s saloon, but why aren’t more blacks at the bar? And where are everyone’s wives? Still, I think it’s possible to appreciate Toot Shor’s life and times for what they were and his saloon for the undeniable good feeling it symbolized for so many. Perhaps Bert Sugar is right when he says, “It was a simpler time back then. Not more innocent, but simpler.”

“Toots” leaves you feeling as if you’ve just smoked a pack of cigarettes, downed three scotch-and-sodas, and wolfed a 20-ounce Porterhouse steak. But it also leaves you with a pleasant aftertaste, with a clear head, and a hunger for more.