How a janitor in Chicago helped get me by means of a yr with out San Francisco dive bars
Like most good stories, this one starts in a dive bar.
“It was 2019, I happened to be in Oakland and there was this girl,” Brandon Hinke tells me on the phone. “I knew her through a friend of a friend, so we met at this pub called The Avenue, a Halloween bar in Oakland. And when I walked in they had John Carpenter’s ‘The Thing’ on one TV and John Carpenter’s ‘Halloween’ on the other, and I just thought, ‘This place is perfect’. “
The date went so well that they decided to continue it long distance, taking turns flying between Hinke’s Washington, DC apartment and his girlfriend’s home in Oakland before they eventually met and moved in together halfway in Chicago. That was March 2020, and you probably know what happened next.
“So we moved to Chicago and just assumed there would be no problems or A GLOBAL PANDEMIC, but then there was and the job I started failed instantly and I was in a city I had never been to worked a lot, ”he says. “So I started driving around aimlessly and came across this place, the Windy City Lounge.”
He tweeted a picture of it on a Monday in June 2020 with this: “Saw this place today, when he was out today, and that’s like the platonic idea” [sic] how a bar should look. “
The photo went viral almost immediately, and then something unexpected happened – everyone started responding with pictures from other dives.
“I just knew I should do something with it,” he says. “We are not homesick, we are sick with cash.”
So he created a Twitter account: Pictures of Dives (@PicturesofDives).
“I created the account the same day.”
:::
Sometime last fall, I found Pictures of Dives.
“Midnite Mine – Fairbanks, Alaska,” read the tweet with two accompanying images.
The first is an exterior shot of a stucco and brick building with an awning that simply says “Cocktails” on the side and a billboard directing people to park on the perfectly named Dunkel Street. One window on the outside is protected by a mesh made of reinforcing bars.
Midnite Mine – Fairbanks, Alaska: pic.twitter.com/RUVcBaH1Mi
– Pictures from dives (@picturesofdives) August 28, 2020
The second is an indoor shot of gray concrete walls covered in chalk messages with an “Old No. 7 ”neon sign on the back wall and two blurry dogs walking past a row of bar stools. There is a longneck on the corner of the bar that I bet didn’t cost more than a few dollars, and the lighting there could best be described as “bad.”
I go deep into an internet rabbit hole and find it has been there since the 1960s, owned by a man named Bob Maloney for 45 years, and aimed at pipeline workers and coal miners. It’s exactly the kind of bar I’d love to have a beer in right now.
Since then, I’ve spent hours flipping through pictures of dives, scrolling through hundreds of bars, and stopping at the really special looking ones – in cities I never thought I’d visit – to do similar internet research. Some of them have closed forever, others have been sold to new owners, but most of them are still there – their sticky floors and sticker-covered bathrooms await our return.
And that’s enough for me for the last 14 months.
Thumb – Ames, IA pic.twitter.com/2VZysoM2Ti
– Pictures of dives (@picturesofdives) June 23, 2020
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Since Hinke opened the account, people have sent him nearly 900 photos of popular neighborhood dives from around the world. His follower number is now over 35,000 and he even has a makeshift website that records every dive. More importantly, however, he has more stories than he can begin with.
“It was fun, people like to send me stuff and tell me stories about the crunchy old guy at the end of the bar or about a bar in Philadelphia where their wallet was stolen when the Eagles made the playoffs and the guy who the one that stole felt bad, so he sent it back and the owner got it the day the Eagles did the Super Bowl, ”says Hinke.
Virtually every bar sent to him goes up on Pictures of Dives except the one where he could clearly see a waiter in a tie (“come on”) or some blurry nonsense.
“My standards are pretty low,” he jokes.
The pinned tweet above the account expresses things pretty well:
“Lots of conversation in the @s about whether certain bars are * really * dives, and while we encourage discussion and debate, we have an intense and robust review process to ensure the authenticity of every dive posted (you send us a picture and say it’s a dive and we believe you) ”
Green Parrot Bar – Key West, FL (Photos by @ SimonGeo98) pic.twitter.com/vCTWoABzAz
– Pictures from dives (@picturesofdives) May 1, 2021
Hinke found a job as a part-time caretaker in Hyde Park, Chicago during the pandemic (“If someone wants a cheap beer, it’s someone who does physical, cheap work and is not well paid,” he laughs), and made all kinds of friends while running the account.
But his biggest fan? His mother Nancy, who likes and comments on practically every Instagram post (yes, Picture of Dives is also on Instagram), mostly with her diving seal of approval.
Even as the world gets vaccinated and bars reopen, the Virginia native says he will continue to run the account, which is great news for my new internet obsession.
The Blue Room – Cedar Falls, IA (Photo by @mjweedman) pic.twitter.com/7RyNwrtjDi
– Pictures of dives (@picturesofdives) May 7, 2021
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I have only visited my brother-in-law in Sacramento twice since he moved there a few years ago. Once to see an apartment he no longer lives in and a second time to visit another apartment he no longer lives in.
But one of my pandemic resolutions is to return for a third visit, 1) to see his new new NEW place, 2) because he is about to have a baby, but also 3) because of a couple of Sacramento dives that I feed at Hinkes have found .
Some of my favorite bars in America were dives that I found in other cities: Snake and Jake’s in New Orleans (a casual Christmas bar away from the French Quarter that felt like there was a good chance I could get stabbed, but in a good way) or Santa’s Pub in Nashville, Tennessee, (another laid back Christmas bar in a double-wide trailer with really phenomenal karaoke) or Jumbo’s Clown Room in LA (a burlesque club with disheveled dancers of all kinds) size and construction, where I once met Blake Anderson from “Workaholics”). Just great, cheap bars full of great memories and fun times.
Snake and Jakes Christmas Club Lounge – New Orleans, LA pic.twitter.com/skBFMBpJLD
– Pictures from dives (@picturesofdives) December 25, 2020
If there’s one thing I’ve always loved about San Francisco, it’s the dive bars, which is why I write about it so often. I miss singing at Bow Bow, miss pinball at Molotov’s, miss beer and a shot at The Tempest, miss the dog wall at Kilowatt, miss the dice cup at Clooney’s, miss the dice game with The Big Dog in the Black Horse London Pub, miss Making Rock – Word games in the Rock Bar, miss live music at the Utah Hotel.
There is something special about the dives from SF. They are all totally and utterly unique, but they always make you feel the same. They are part of what makes the city a city, and I couldn’t be happier to finally do more than just look at pictures of them.
Check out pictures of dives on Twitter here and if you’re generous get Brandon a beer here.
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