A Defense of the American Dive Bar

Interior staircase leading up from Silver Fox Lounge to Garnet Avenue, a below-street-level dive bar in Pacific Beach, San Diego

Sooner or later, somebody is going to call us a dive. We’d like to say thank you in advance. A dive bar is an unpretentious, inexpensive neighborhood bar that earned its regulars instead of designing for them. The bar sense of the word dates to American English by 1871, perhaps because such bars sat in […]