Best Dive Bar Essay

Dive bars are broadly defined as a shabby and disreputable establishment—essentially the lowest of quality drinking establishments. Though there are numerous guides to Boston’s “best dive bars,” this complicates the definition of what exactly constitutes what makes a bar a “dive”. If a dive bar is always shabby and seedy, is it possible to be “the best” in being the worst? If so, would the award for the best dive bar actually go to the worst? Many of these common standards that define a dive bar are a series of contradictions. For instance, a bar could have a jukebox, or have no music at all. Dives can serve food, or strictly just serve alcohol. There are dives that are falling apart, and brand new dives. There are dark, silent dives and there’s bright and loud ones. Boston’s oldest, family-owned dive bar J.J. Foley’s has been recognized as one of Boston’s best dive bars, it is the effort exerted by the owners that has kept …show more content…
Why all the fuss over a barroom? Dubbed the “poor man’s club” by the Anti-Saloon League at the turn of the twentieth century, many bar regulars asserted that the “[saloons] hold on the community does not wholly proceed from its satisfying the thirst for drink. It also satisfies the thirst for drink.” The term “club” had in fact been associated with drink culture since the early seventeenth century. Clubs among English-speaking people were quite literally heavy sticks with a knob at one end, and the phrase “to club” meant simply to beat (i.e. “The man clubbed his enemy to the ground”). However, the verb also came to mean “to combine” or “to join” into a mass. This sense of coming together made its way into taverns in early America. By the eighteenth century, a “club” meant a meeting or assembly for social gathering. The term signifies a method of communal drinking at the