Dive bars

I was sipping a beer on the patio behind Ten Cat Tavern with my friend Charlie, debating which was the better Chicago bar: the Long Room up the street, or the Ten Cat. The Long Room was a neighborhood bar that had once been a dive bar. Ten Cat, according to Yelp, is a dive bar now. This requires explanation. For old-school relics like me, calling a tavern a dive bar has not, historically, been a compliment. When we moved into the neighborhood thirty years ago, the Long Room was Blue Bird Liquors, a Chicago dive bar in the traditional mold — a combination packaged-goods store and neighborhood shot-and-a-beer joint. Blue Bird Liquors didn’t have the wall of TVs obligatory in modern bars. Considering how dark it was, I’m not 100 percent sure it had electricity.

Cockburn has rarely met a pub he didn't like, though plenty of pubs haven't taken a liking to Cockburn. Fortunately, occasional dissolute behavior was never a problem at Post Pub, the old neighborhood watering hole on L Street in Washington. So you can imagine Cockburn's dismay when he learned last spring that Post Pub would be closing after 43 years. The cause wasn't so much the pandemic as it was a tragic outbreak of public health. The Washington Post reports that 'back in the era of hard-drinking lunches, bartenders at the Post Pub used to stir up three-gallon batches of gin and vodka martinis and a two-gallon batch of Manhattans to prepare for the daily crush. And that was just for Mondays.’ What happened?