The Holland Bar – A Classic New York City Dive Bar

The Holland Bar is a real dive bar where most people are regulars who aren’t worried about how cool or attractive or sober or sane they come off. They come here because there’s a decent jukebox with shit like Jim Croce, Sinatra, and the Stones, pints of Budweiser for $3, and you can sit around telling dirty jokes with a bartender named Dr. Bill (I have a feeling he’s not a real doctor). Sure some the regulars don’t have all their teeth, but you don’t plan on kissing them do you? Who needs all your teeth when you’ve got really fucked up stories to tell anyways?

Holland Bar has been around since 1929, and has an old man bar ambience with a slight glaze of character: an American flag, a few collages of the regulars and a neon sign above the bar that doesn’t work, so it’s ringed with blue x-mas lights and lit that way. Basically this is the kind of bar where you get really drunk and spill your guts, telling your most awful dark secrets to the barkeep and he doesn’t blink because he gets baby-eating crackheads from the Port Authority in here all the time. And it opens at 8am. And they sell gift certificates.

Holland Bar
532 9th Ave. btw W 39th & 40th Sts.
[Hells Kitchen]