Dive bar

The outdoor signage of a dive bar in Los Osos, California — nicknamed “The Marriage Breaker” by local residents.

A dive bar is a type of bar or pub. Dive bars generally have a relaxed and informal atmosphere—they are often referred to by local residents as "neighborhood bars," where people in the neighborhood gather to drink and socialize. Individual bars may be considered to be disreputable, sinister, or even a detriment to the community:

“A plot to entrap young women for the dives of Northern Wisconsin has been discovered.”

“The dives themselves are nuisances, per se, and that is why they have to pay such high license prices.”

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary indicates that, in the United States in the 1880s, the term referred to an illegal drinking den or other place of ill repute, especially one located in a basement. However, this usage has since become obsolete. Some people attribute the term to the practice of patrons diving under tables when trouble broke out, particularly gunplay.^{[citation needed]}

In 2010, Playboy magazine 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. It’s a place that wears its history proudly.”

In popular culture

Music

• "I Love This Bar," a song performed by Toby Keith, is about a dive bar.
• The Pet Shop Boys' hit song "West End Girls" mentions "a dive bar in a West End town."
• "Papa Was A Rodeo," a song by The Magnetic Fields, asks "What are we doing in this dive bar, how can you live in a place like this?"
• "Longhaired Redneck" by David Allan Coe. "They'd never come to see me in this dive."

Television

• In the television series Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives, Guy Fieri often visits dive bars to sample food.

Film

• The first fight club in the eponymous film is started in the basement of a dive bar.

Video games

• In the Sims 3 expansion pack The Sims 3: Late Night, players can put dive bars on their maps.

See also

• Drinking culture
• Honky-tonk
• Roadhouse
• Speakeasy

Further reading

• Dayton, Todd (2009). San Francisco's Best Dive Bars. New York: Ig Publishing. ISBN 097031258X.