I have some nominations for New Orleans which is in the big leagues for this type of thing. The one a lot of people are familiar with is The Dungeon located somewhere downtown. It only opens a midnight or so and you have to walk down the alley with little bridges to get to the bar. It is two stories and kept very dark. The place is filled with dark metal torture equipment and some of it is made into tables and things. They close and dawn and the weird part is that the alleyway can be closed by a rather normal, discrete door and the whole place just disappears during the day making people wonder if they dreamed the whole thing. I think that one tries to be strange. I am not sure about the next one.
Snake and Jakes is located in a very residential uptown neighborhood. It is in the bottom floor of this large house and you could walk or drive by it many times without even knowing what it is. You walk up these steps and then down into the bar which looks very much like someones basement used as a year-round party place. The decor is just plain odd. The most obvious decorations are Christmas decorations with lots of lights shining even through the oppressive New Orleans summer. As you walk in, the cheesy Christmas lights are the first thing to grab your attention. The 2nd thing is the clientele which can only be described as diverse. The few times I went there, a significant portion of the people were hardcore bikers and other rough looking people. A lot of people were transvestites and obviously flaming males. The rest of the people were everything from midgets to college students. Because it really was built to be a house, the place wasn’t that big and all of us were just crammed in there together. It was cheap too.
There used to be a really bizarre bar on Drachman Street in Tucson called The Pig Pen. The owner was a truly twisted eccentric and the drinks were generally named after menstruation, diarrhea, etc… If someone played “You’re So Vain” on the jukebox the owner would stop what he was doing and parade around the bar like a drum major, but with some sort of petrified elephant phallas as the baton. Their matchbooks stated that the bar was “…specializing in sexual harrassment since 19__”…
I wish I could remember the drink names, but it’s been years, and I think I drank a lot of whatever the menstrual drink was… :rolleyes: Any Tucson dopers who could weigh in on this one?
T-SQUARE-- I saw the trhead title and that’s EXACTLY the bar I came in to describe. Called Het Velootje. You kind of look around for something that might be a bench or something under old rugs and empty milk crates and clothes, and then make sure it’s not too broken to support your weight and then try not to burn your hair off with whatever old kerosene lantern is ligthing the table. I’ve only been there a couple of times because it’s so fucking odd you never feel welcome there. One evening one of the regulars-- some old coot-- started cussing us out. I think he was an old school neo-Nazi, and the . . um. . . owner? tender? Told us to ignore him. Very tense. And the tender’s so bizarre himself, with the tats and the odd anti-drug stuff here and there (ex-addict?) and this general Charles Manson effect. You eventually get his attention and he finds this, like, dorm fridge with a few different beers in it, and then back to petting the cat (Duvel) and tending the fire. Damn, I miss Ghent.
You took the words right out of my mouth. The first time someone brought me to S&J’s, I was totally convinced it was a joke and that my drunken self was being lead into some stranger’s house. Same thoughts on the patrons as well: you could walk in and see a bunch guys dressed like Rob Zombie at a table right next to a Dockers commercial. It gets a crowd after places like F&M’s slow down, so basically you get there when it’s light out.
The first time I heard about it was from a female roommate who was also bipolar and at risk for another manic episode. I am dead serious when I say that she described it in a somewhat casual way and we started making phone calls about what to do with her. The next day, I had her take me to this so-called place and I was floored and she was vindicated.
That place is still going? Whoa! I was there probably 20 years ago and the place was a hoot–if you ordered a beer you got two, people did cascading ten beer fountains into their mouths, the fuzzy collection of turkey wishbones on the light fixtures was, well, UNIQUE, and about the grumpiest bunch of old farts tending bar I have ever seen in one spot. They kept shushing all of us and telling us to quiet down, so we started the entire bar singing the National Anthem–they couldn’t very well interrupt us in the middle of THAT, now could they? Heh–once we all got done singing they 86’d us, leaving room for some of the many people lined up outside to get in. Amusing place, tres seedy…
Fanny Anne’s Saloon in old town Sacramento was always fun–the place is about fifteen feet wide but four or so stories tall, and the best place to sit is outside the restrooms, as the signs on them are…equivocal… to the uninitiated. Good blue cheese burgers last time I was there.
The Acropolis in Portland–the owner has a beef ranch and sells steak dinners from his steers in the bar for like three bucks. It’s also a stripper bar. Cheap meat all around and a full bar with over a hundred beers on tap–does it get any better?
Back in the 90’s a female friend & I found our way into an underground club in San Francisco. I guess by SF standards, at first glance it wasn’t that weird. Sure, it was literally underground. Dark, smokey, lots of techno-gothic stuff going on. Sort of like those underground vampire clubs you see on TV & movies. Except in this one, most of the patrons were also on roller-blades. An underground, techno-gothic vampiric roller-blader club! Who knew?
There was the Barber’s Closet in Madison, Wisconsin, part of the Hotel Washington complex. Approaching from the main entry, you saw a barbershop, occasionally still hosting customers. Listen closely and you could hear music through the wall. A clever customer would think of the name of the bar and look at the little cupboard on the wall. Pull the leather strop (used for sharpening straight razors) and the cupboard swings out on hinges. It was a speakeasy during Prohibition. They had a huge drink menu, including a page with mixed drinks made up in large snifter glasses, with a note about the enforced limit - I forget if it was 2 or 3 per person. There were alcoves with cozy couches in place, and occasionally they’d have entertainment like tarot readers. You got people wandering in from the other parts, like a bar better known for hosting a lot of bands before they strike it big, and the leather bar. Sadly, it was destroyed in a fire years ago.
Weird for decor is Bray’s Brewing in Naples, Maine. Small brewpub but popular with the locals. The obvious stand-out item of decor is the number of dolls’ heads suspended from the rafters and just about everywhere else, mostly in the brewery area. The brewmaster told us it started as a joke and then people kept bringing them in, and it got out of hand from there.
I have another one for New Orleans although there are many honorable mentions. Igors on St. Charles avenue is a hard-core bar that decided to put some washing machines in the back. The whole thing is open 24/7 and you can be in there eating chicken wings at 4:00 am, jamming to some hard tunes with tons of folks dancing and some chick will walk through with a laundry basket. I have heard of bars experimenting with other services but this place is weird because it is a throw-down bar that happens to offer laundry services. I have heard that the concepts was so successful that they expanded to other areas in New Orleans.
Kinda tame in comparison, but the weirdest bar I’ve been in (in terms of design) is Muse, between Roppongi and Nishi-Azabu. The place is designed to not be noticed: what looks like a door is just a false decoration, the real door looks like a window with a flower planter. Inside, there are at least two ‘public’ sections that are accessed via hidden passages.
The Minus Five bars (I’ve only been to the Sydney one) are something to behold, if only to think “well I would never have thought to pitch that idea to a venture capitalist”. The name says it all - it really is -5 Centigrade (23 F) in there. The bar is made of ice, the stools, the drinking glasses, the decor - everything. You can only stay 30 minutes.
My weird one is also in Barcelona. It was a fairy bar, acording to the sign (winged fairies, not boy ones), and the interior was full of fiberglass (?) trees with tree-faces molded into them. It was dark and woodsy and a lot like being in a an enchanted forest. Actually pretty cool. I would have no idea how to find it again.
Well there was this after-after hours in NYC (which in NYC is pretty far after hours) that a friend of mine took me to once. I doubt it had a name. One little room below ground. The bartender sold coke (not the soda) from behind the bar (why not, the place was illegal anyway). And full of, amoung other things, all the jazz muscians still too keyed up from their last gig to go home yet. Every so often the door would open letting in the morning sun and the patrons shrink back and hiss. Well, not really, but I could tell they wanted to. Sordid little place but the music was great.
And then of course there’s Mars, where I spent (in all senses of the word) my youth. (You can see it in the open credits of NYPD Blue.) It’s the ultimate neighborhood bar, if you neighborhood is the East Villiage. A beautiful mix of teenage runaways, NYU students, assorted punks, failed artists, and ancient rummies all living together in love and squalor.
Those fuzzy wishbones were placed there by servicemen going off to World War One! They were to be reclaimed when the guys returned, they did not, so, never moved, never dusted.
Any Tucson dopers who could weigh in on this one?