That would be my suggestion. I worked in a shithole in college, out on the edge of town. The kind of place where they know what you mean when you ask for a ‘short’ beer or a ‘red’ beer. Cheapest shots in town too. The kind of place when guys would hang around during the day and their wives knew where to call looking for them at 3:00 on a Thursday. And I would have to lie in such a way that the wife knew he was there but the drunk thought I was covering for him. Good times.
Or maybe ‘biker bar.’ I’ve heard that a few times to indicate a place even hipsters wouldn’t go into.
Seattle is full of hipsters, but even they aren’t foolish enough to go into the commercial fisherman’s bars.
This thread has me recalling more and more details of my dad’s bar in the 60’s. He didn’t set out to make it a dive bar, but it was the only bar in town where Blacks and whites both went. This attracted people on the fringes of both, and police scrutiny as well. It didn’t even have taps, just bottles, so we kids would work in the dank basement putting empties back in the cases as they came down the chute. Once, when my dad wasn’t her, somebody wanted to show off his new gun. Luckily, everybody yelled “not in the floor - the kid’s down there!” so he shot into the ceiling. No worry there: a few weeks earlier they’d chipped the body of old guy who’d live upstairs off his toilet sea, and the unit was still vacant.
There was also a designated nail in the back wall. My dad would put any wedding rings he’d swept up on it for later reclamation.
We never caught on with the bikers, but we were adopted by the local hippie commune. They lived nearby in a scandalized residential neighborhood. One day the police were summoned with a report that a dozen of them were sitting in the branches of the tree in the front yard, drinking beer. Great was the frustration that there was no law against this.
I dunno, I don’t think of dives as necessarily “pleasant,” but I also don’t think they’re necessarily unpleasant. Or maybe they are, I dunno. That reminds me of a terrible dive I used to go to in LA that I nicknamed Stabby Joe’s. Was actually called Crabby Joe’s, but my god was that place a shithole. Got shut down because people were pretty shameless about selling drugs out of it. Good times!
I was thinking along the same lines with School bar or School pub. The bar, and possibly, but not necessarily the patrons, are old-school and not gentrified.
A dive bar may well be minority selective , or have likely lads (people likely to commit petty crimes… maybe called “gang” … but “gang” is a misnomer) or motorbike club members