After the party winds down and clubs close, you still need a place to finish off the night before passing out with a half-eaten gas-station egg-salad sandwich in your hand. Thank God for dive bars.
It's hard to pin down exactly what a dive bar is -- you just know it when
you step into one. It's all about the ambiance. It's dark, dirty, low-key, and smells like
cigarettes. The term might have originated during Prohibition to
describe basement-level speakeasies.
They open early and close late. They might have a kitchen, and if you're really lucky, you might get laid with a drunk tourist in a bathroom stall.
In 2010, Playboy described a dive bar as "a church for down-and-outers and those who romanticize them, a rare place where high and low rub elbows -- bums and poets, thieves and slumming celebrities."
What else can you expect from a dive bar? How about some pool, darts, and karaoke? Aside from the low expectations and high ATM fees, dives are complete with activities that should keep you from dumping $500 to bail yourself out of jail.