The Best, The Worst And The Dirtiest Dive Bars In The United States

here is a good article.....My only gripe is that I know Boston, has some dirty grungy bars!!!!!

contributed by rtcrooks June 20, 2008 at 5:12pm

We have all have a strange attraction and loyalty to our local dive bar. The strong, cheap drinks and smell of vomit bring us back night after night. Our feelings of simultaneous disgust and comfort are the common denominator in this filthy genre of establishments. Whether you love them, hate them or both, the crowd and character of your neighborhood pub are things to be respected. Here is our list of the best, the worst and the dirtiest dive bars in the United States.

Seattle Dive Bar: Five Point Cafe

415 Cedar St
Seattle, WA 98121
(206) 441-4777

If you are looking for good times, stiff drinks, rude bartenders and a chicken fried steak the size of your head, Five Point is your spot. With breakfast served 24 hours a day by wait staff that are not afraid to talk a little shit, this dive is as dirty as they come. The greasy food is so good that the frequent complaints about finding hair in it fall on deaf ears. The men's urinal is a hole in the ground with window view of the space needle. A place to go where no one knows your name, and if you told them, the strongest cocktails in town would help them to forget it by morning.

Dallas Dive Bar: Adair's Saloon

2624 Commerce St
Dallas, TX 75226
(214) 939-9900

Adair's Saloon is a breath of dirty air in a city so wealthy they named a horrible soap opera after it. At Adairs, Happy Hour still means $1.50 for drafts and they serve Lone Star Beer and their World Famous Beer all night long. Live Music every weeknight and never a cover. As one person once revelled to me, Adairs is where you go when you've given up on being able to drive home the rest of the night and you are ready to take that bullet train to blackoutville. Good unpretentious crowd. Thank you Adair, for being a good TexasBar. I look forward to getting so drunk at your bar, that I will not be able to tell whether it is my extreme level of intoxication or this guy's Fu Manchu that caused me to piss myself.

Los Angeles Dive Bar: The Goat Hill Tavern

1830 Newport Blvd
Costa Mesa, CA 92627
(949) 548-8428

Do you like the smell of sweat, cigarette smoke, urine, stale beer and vomit? Me too. That is why I love The Goat Hill Tavern. Walk into this bar and you'll likely be amazed by the beer selection they offer (100+ beers). But, also consider the gourmet fare (Pickled Eggs, Peanuts) and the thorough wine list (Beringer, Gallo), and you have the makings for a swingin' singles establishment. While actually located in the Los Angeles Metropolitan area (Costa Mesa), Goat Hill has the some of the finest amentities one would expect from a Southern California watering hole: hard-ass doormen, sections of ceiling replaced with lattice (smoking ok), dirt floor, shitty televisions, and horrible music. Definitely worth visit if the 30 mile detour from the heart of LA is not too daunting.

New York Dive Bar: Welcome To The Johnson's

123 Rivington St
New York, NY 10002
(212) 420-9911

Hipster irony. Love it, hate it? No big deal. Welcome to the Johnson's, the LES bar that looks like you stepped back into the '80s and accidentally ended up in a trailer home in Idaho. The bar's interior is covered in family portraits and drunken wall-scrawling that grossly resembles graffitti. Bad music, bad drinks, bad service to boot. Definitely going for the dirty and shitty = cool, motif, WTTJ's saving grace is its $2 PBRs in Manhattan, which is pretty much unheard of. Maybe we're too hipster to like something hipster (note this list). But, then again, maybe I want to go to a bar and find some girls that smell better than me. Definitely a place where I wouldn't think twice about pissing in a used beer bottle while hammered at a booth, and/or throwing up on myself without shame.

Las Vegas Dive Bar: Dive Bar

3035 E. Tropicana Blvd , Suite E & F
Las Vegas, NV 89121
(702) 579-4707

This bar is on this list because of the ridiculousness of their pretense. "Dive Bar - King of Bars". It's like when you tell the son of Ford Motor Co.'s CFO to create something "cool" or what "the kids will like" and he comes ups with a bar that has a really nice logo (Flames and Poker imagery) and serves filet mignon. I mean, I like that you have horrible live music, scheduled on the regular, but if "Dive Bar" is just a clever name, you suck at life. I'm just kidding, I don't like horrible live music - so provincial. On a side note, the bar is in the Walmart Shopping Center just off Tropicana, so you can bulk up on rollbacked Lamar Odom shirts for $0.88 after you get liquored up and it sounds like a good idea.

Portland Dive Bar: Shanghai Tunnel

211 SW Ankeny St
Portland, OR 97204-2706
(503) 220-4001

This little joint hides downstairs in the the basement of a building about a nine iron from the Burnside Bridge. As the story goes, there is a tunnel out the back of the underground bar. Back in the day, "Shanghaiing" was a regular practice in Portland. Able bodied men who would pass out drunk at the bar (or be drugged by bribed bartenders) would be kidnapped and carried through the tunnel to the river and taken out to sea. They would wake up in the morning as a slave worker on a ship bound for the Orient. Gnarly. Now they just serve $1.25 Rainier Beer in the bottle and some killer Tater Tots with which to stuff your drunk face.

Atlanta Dive Bar: Gravity Pub

1257 Glenwood Ave SE
Atlanta, GA 30316
(404) 627-5555

Hotlanta? ATL? Alright. Oh who doesn't love gentrification? Located in what was once a traditionally blue-collared part of Atlanta, Gravity Pub has tried to market itself as a dive bar. Someone needs to tell these boners that you can't become a dive bar, you have to be a dive bar. But in all seriousness, we're completely over the whole thrift-store decor and the fact the place is covered in polaroids does not make me want to listen to Death Cab. It takes me want to listen to Slayer, actually. This is especially the case after you run into a bunch of trustafarians or Emory students wanting to talk to you about Obama.

San Francisco Dive Bar: Trad'r Sam

6150 Geary Blvd
San Francisco, CA 94121
(415) 221-0773

Trad'r Sam makes this list because the last time I went here, I got blind drunk and couldn't make it back to my friend's house only 3 blocks away. I ended up taking two cabs and it took me three tries to find a roach motel that had a vacancy. The good news is that I got laid and free continental breakfast, the bad news is that the evening cost me an arm and a leg and I ended up on the other side of the city. Thank you 4 Scorpion Bowls. The best way to describe this place is that the owner was probably gay (tropical) in the early 1980's, but then got married and had some kids and decided to fund his 401k rather than reinvest some money into the bar's interior. This place is also great if you like not being able to lock the bathroom door and you still pay with cash. Rude bartenders too...but who cares? Everyone here is drunk.

San Jose Dive Bar: Tres Gringos

83 S 2nd St
San Jose, CA 95113
(408) 278-9888

You know what the world doesn't need? Another beach-themed bar not even near the beach. Rule No1: Straw awnings do not belong indoors.However the main reason why Tres Gringos is on this list is because they are able to bring a Mexican Dive bar straight out of spring break and into the nerdiest city in the world. It is even complete with a taco stand at the front, and plenty of taco resembling puke at the bathrooms in the back. The other reason it is on this list is the seriousness with which Beer Pong is both played and administered here. Beer Pong which normally belongs in the basements of fraternities and binge drinkers, is now brought into the public sector and it is drunken gold. The chaos after a few hours of beerpong at a bar on wednesday nights is unprecidented. If you are the kind of person looking for a few sips on a martini while chatting about how the nasdaq dropped 3 points, you'll probably want to steer clear.

Houston Dive Bar: The Proletariat

903 Richmond Ave
Houston, TX 77006
(713) 523-1199

This bar is a hipster mainstay, and a douchebag-who-thinks-he's-cool-mecca. Yeah bad service and bad environment were cool, like 5 years ago. In Los Angeles or New York. But Houston? Just go on and become that rancher that you were supposed to be. The next Elliott Smith is coming from the above cities, not Texas. People like me go to to Texas to eat ribs and ride mechanical bulls, so please figure out a way to live up to our expectations. Also, this bar looks like its about to fall apart, is super smoky, the black walls are disgusting and now I kind of want to go there and get in a fight, have a one-night stand, and maybe even break a bottle over someone's emo kid's head.

Chicago Dive Bar: Matchbox

770 N Milwaukee Ave
Chicago, IL 60622
(312) 666-9292

The name is indicative of what you are going to get in this bar; a small, packed house. If you are claustrophobic or have an aversion to social interaction or cigarette smoke, this place is not for you. Packed into a narrow space furnished with only 12 barstools, you had better come early if you would like a seat. Matchbox does boast some of the best cocktails in town, made with fine ingredients. Hand squeezed lime juice for the margaritas, Bloody Marys mixed with horseradish and topped with veggies that have been pickled in-house. The craft of drink making is very much a part of this Chicago's favorite shit hole.

Miami Dive Bar: Zeke's Roadhouse

25 Lincoln Rd

Miami Beach, FL 33139

(305) 532-0087

Miami is a pretty amazing town to drink and party in, so how this place managed to screw up the idea of a bar is very puzzling. Video Poker, check. Run-down Pool Table, check. This is definitely the bar where all the old strippers or go-go dancers go to die, and a big part of me likes that. The part of me that doesn't like old ex-strippers and go-go dancers, doesn't like it, however. Definitely a place to go on your last day on vacation, after you spent all your money on bottle service and foam parties. And on the weekends, this watering hole turns into a low-class nightclub, so there's one more chance to get lucky. Oh, andmost of its meals are under $5.

Austin Dive Bar: Ginny's Little Longhorn Saloon

5434 Burnet Rd
Austin, TX 78756
(512) 458-1813

Ahh, Texas: Seedy, Racist, Loud and Raucous. Make sure you visit Ginny's on Chicken Shit Sundays. They convert a pool table into a giant bingo card and cage a chicken on top of it. Bar patrons are invited to buy numbers, and when the chicken shits on all 5 of your numbers, you win $100. This takes place every Sunday. Every other night of the week there is live (shitty) music. Good, cheap beer doesn't make up for the fact that I could care less if Texas were to secede from the U.S. This bar recently won an award for Austin's Best Budget Date Spot 2008.

Is your local dive bar gnarly? We want to hear about it. Regale us all with your best, worst, or dirtiest tale of the place here.