What makes a dive a dive?

In New York, the debate may turn on a few key criteria. Can you buy a beer for less than $7? Is there a weird, damp smell coming from nowhere in particular? Is its name a possessive proper noun, like “Frank’s” or “Rudy’s”? Is there a jukebox, and does it contain compact discs? Is the bathroom scary?

These are important questions. But there’s another, arguably more essential characteristic: A dive brings together people who would otherwise never be in the same room.

Sit down at the bar and you may find yourself next to a retired firefighter on the stool to your right and a banker on your left. A group of students may pile in through the graffiti-tagged door, hoping this isn’t the kind of place that cards. A writer alone in a worn booth may be scribbling notes for her screenplay, while a former boxing champ tends bar.

“It’s this beautiful little universe within itself,” said Izzy Tulloch, a bartender at Lucy’s in Manhattan’s East Village, “and you get to sit back and watch it all unfold.”

A dive is a day-drunk American dream, a dingy oasis where dividing lines — race, class, background — blur and fade. It is a respite without reservations, where you can kill an hour or pass an afternoon. A place out of time.

But things change, even if dive bars are supposed to stay the same. In today’s New York, the humble dive is at risk of becoming an endangered species as hole-in-the-wall establishments face high rents, rising costs and a disappearing clientele.

“There’s no day drinkers, they’re dying out,” said Peter Gonzalez, the owner of Johnny’s in the West Village, as he stood behind the bar on a May afternoon. The wall behind him was plastered in stickers promoting bands and political catchphrases. “Young kids don’t really drink as much,” he said. “And things have changed so much in the neighborhood, everything’s very corporate now.”

Several dives have closed in recent years. Billymark’s West in Chelsea, which boasted its $4 beers and shots on a hand-marked sign on its facade, shuttered in 2024. Midtown’s Subway Inn, which had relocated thrice since its original opening in the 1930s, also had its last call that year.

Pencil Factory is gone. Holland Bar is no more. Irene’s Place, Smith’s Bar, Grassroots Tavern.

And those still standing face uncertain futures. “The Lower East Side keeps changing,” read a January post on the 169 Bar Instagram account. “Neighborhood staples like ours are being pushed out — but we’re fighting to stay.” Further uptown, people have been rallying to save Jimmy’s Corner as it faces eviction.

Which raises another important question: What will New York lose if its dive bars go away?

‘Freedom-Loving Spirits’

The term “dive” dates back to at least the 1800s. It refers to the idea of physically descending into the bars, which were often in basements.

In “Low Life,” a book about the gritty history of Manhattan’s underbelly, Lucy Sante wrote of how some early dives had no glasses. “Drinks, at three cents per, were served from barrels stacked behind the bar via thin rubber tubes,” Ms. Sante writes, “the stipulation being that the customer could drink all he wanted until he had to stop for a breath.”

They were places that welcomed those who had nowhere else to go, often immigrants or other people on the margins.

There was community underground. In the 1860s Walt Whitman hung out at Pfaff’s, a Manhattan haunt that was, in its time, a refuge for gay people and bohemians. “Laugh on laughers!” the poet wrote of the bar. “Drink on drinkers! Bandy the jest! Toss the theme from one to another!”

Where the drinks flowed, so did talk of politics and ideas.

“These are inherently social places where people can have conversations about the things they don’t approve of, what they wish they had more of and matters of injustice,” said Christine Sismondo, the author of “America Walks into a Bar.”

In the late 19th century, Justus Schwab, a labor activist who emigrated from Germany, ran a small bar in the Lower East Side advertised as a place for “freedom-loving spirits.”

Emma Goldman, an anarchist and women’s rights activist, was a regular. In her autobiography, she described it as “a Mecca for French Communards, Spanish and Italian refugees, Russian politicals, and German socialists and anarchists.” People would come together at Justus’s place, she wrote, to “drink his delicious beer and wine and argue world-problems far into the night.”

Dives “were much more political prior to Prohibition,” Ms. Sismondo said, which was part of the reason some people wanted to shut them down. For the prohibitionist Ku Klux Klan, she added, raiding bars became “a pretext for harassing minorities.”

But dives did not go extinct then, nor did their tradition of fermenting activism. In the 1960s, the Stonewall Inn, a mafia-operated dive in the West Village, was a hangout for queer New Yorkers. Its main bar lacked running water, but it was a place where they could dance, hold hands and exist more freely.

“It was the one place, for me, at 18, I could dance,” said Mark Segal, who spent several nights at Stonewall back then, adding that “it didn’t matter if it was dirty and sold watered down drinks.”

In 1969, a police raid at Stonewall led to a violent clash and days-long protests. The incursion, and the resistance, expanded the meaning of the dive, which became a civil-rights landmark. It also changed patrons like Mr. Segal, whose presence at the raid and its aftermath led to him becoming a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front.

“That night at Stonewall,” he said, “was the night I became an activist.”

Democracy and the $3 Beer

At around that time, roughly 40 blocks north, Jimmy Glenn was creating his own place of belonging.

Mr. Glenn, a Black man from South Carolina, and Swietlana Garbarska, a Jewish immigrant from Poland, met at a bar in Times Square, then a seedy part of town. They became a couple, and in 1971 took over that same bar space and made it their own, calling it Jimmy’s Corner.

“I don’t think my parents would’ve met and been accepted together anywhere else in the world,” said Adam Glenn, their son, who runs the bar now that his parents have passed away.

Growing up in the family dive, Mr. Glenn said he felt like he “traveled the world from a bar stool,” constantly interacting with people from different backgrounds.

These days, the world of Jimmy’s is not guaranteed. Mr. Glenn is currently fighting to save Jimmy’s as the building transfers ownership and a legal battle plays out with its landlord.

“Progress isn’t a bad thing,” he said. “I remember when Times Square was dangerous. But if we don’t protect the authentic parts of New York, why would anyone come if there’s nothing real and original?”

For now, Jimmy’s is still serving $3 beers.

“Could I sell them for $4? Yeah, but it’s not about the price,” Mr. Glenn said. “I want a bar where I can have a struggling actor, a C.E.O., a homeless person all coming in. And as long as they all act the right way and do the right thing, they’re all welcome.”

The $3 beer is its own kind of democratic ideal. And these days, it’s hard to find. The median price of a beer in New York is $9.16, more expensive than any other major American city, according to Toast, a technology platform for restaurants.

Ms. Tulloch, the Lucy’s bartender, said that drinks there range from around $6 to $13. “People sometimes will get upset about the prices, because it’s more expensive than you expect from a dive,” she said. “But it’s really the cheapest you can make it and still keep your doors open and your people paid.”

‘Good Bartenders and a Jukebox’

Rising prices are not the only thing that may be diluting the appeal of the dive. Americans consume less alcohol than they used to. People spend less time with friends. And the aesthetics of a dive — bad lighting, sticky floors — don’t necessarily draw the Instagram set.

“People want to take a picture of their $20 Cosmo,” Mr. Gonzalez said. “The only thing we have to offer are good bartenders and a jukebox.”

Also, the rites and rituals of the dive — running a tab, getting the attention of a surly bartender, drinking elbow to elbow with regulars — may not come as naturally to socially atomized 20-somethings who came of drinking age during the pandemic lockdowns.

Dive bars may still have the power to win people over — if they come in the door. Danyel Hueyopan, a 25-year-old architectural drafter, said that chatting with strangers in public spaces has often felt unnatural. But when he does go out to a dive, Mr. Hueyopan said, it forces him to “listen and even talk to people that I don’t really know,” which has made him more open.

But staying open can be a challenge — for people and for dive bars.

Casablanca, a dim lounge with a faded sign, was a neighborhood staple in Brooklyn. The cash-only bar had “happy hour all the time” with a $7 beer-and-shot special. “You only knew about it if you lived in Bed-Stuy,” said Tolu Okeowo, 37, a marketing professional who was a regular there.

Then, in 2020, Casablanca closed. Roughly two years later, Dick & Jane’s BarRoom opened in the space, now offering cocktails and taking reservations.

Ms. Okeowo said she has enjoyed the expanded food offerings and the local DJs that the new place brings in. “It’s become a little brighter with more energy,” she said. Still, the idea of making a reservation can feel restraining.

“We’re losing the spontaneity of New York City,” Ms. Okeowo said.

The worn floors of a dive, the walls with stickers upon stickers — this isn’t just a cosmetic choice. It is a natural accumulation. They hold the bar’s history: the years of people that have drank, danced, argued and hidden out there. A good dive shows its age.

Even the ones that have vanished often have a way of coming back from the dead. In 2025, Siberia, a bar in a Midtown Manhattan subway station, returned after shuttering almost two decades ago.

Lucy’s, the East Village dive, also came back to life in 2025 after a brief closure.

“It smells different because they put in a new ceiling,” Ms. Tulloch said. “But it’s starting to get its worn smell back. No one wants a dive bar that smells like a new car.”