119 Bar

This place was an awful dive, full of weirdos, creeps, and junkies. The bar WAS dark and smelly, and the drinks were CHEAP.
IT WAS AWESOME.
It’s a terrible tragedy that it has closed. Manhattan is so lame. No more Mars, no more 119. So, I guess if you want to go to a cheap bar without black lights and UNTZ UNTZ! music, you better head to the outer boroughs.

This place was bad, bad news.
RIP.

Simply put — dark, dirty dive.
The music is unbearably loud, the pint glasses are usually chipped, and the bartender looks like she can definitely kick my ass (Almost did once, when I didn’t produce a tip fast enough).
$ 4 Brooklyn Lagers, furniture that was probably found on the sidewalk, and a two-​block walk from my job makes this place my second home.
And, yes, the bathrooms really are that disgusting.

Well, I started to come here when I was 18. Super divey, heavy handed bar tenders, gross sketchy bathrooms perfect for you know what.
When I was 19 I brought my friend here for her 16^th birthday. Some random dudes bought us drinks.
When I was 20, I started to work next door, and would come here even more often.
Now I’m in my mid-​20s, and hear that this place may be closing. It was a large part of my NYC years and I’ll be sad when I walk down 15^th street if it’s no longer there.
Whoever buys this place… they have A LOT of cleaning to do!

I hated this bar. I got taken here after an event uptown by someone I had just met and I was completely unimpressed.
The place felt dirty and the people were strange — I was embarrassed to be there. The bathrooms were disgusting and the whole experience was uncomfortable.
Now walking by 15^th St at Irving Pl makes me sad.

Yep. Blacked out I guess.
Well, sheeeeeeeeiiiiiit.

WHAT IS THIS PLACE? Ironic? Serious? A FANTASTICAL JOURNEY INTO THE SECRET LIVES OF POST-​FRATERNITY LIFE? It’s cheap. It’s dark. It’s pretty fun. However, they ran out of budlight when I was there & I was forced to get my drank on with reg. budwieser, which is kind of crossing the line for me. I did it of course, and stayed out until 4. What can I say, I’m a trooper.

I give this place 5 stars because it is so incredibly cheap. It definitely embraces a dive bar atmosphere. But, I think they might have a shortage of light bulbs.

We stumbled into this place a few months ago, heard some good music coming from the speakers and a couple of coke heads dancing enthusiastically to whatever they could hear, $ 4 Sierra Nevadas made their way down my throat. I am now a regular and not too sure what I think about it.
I feel comfortable there. It isn’t pretentious, but doesn’t make you feel all that good about yourself either. Okay, I can afford to drink here… I suppose. Oh, I heard this band last time, last week, three beers deep. Damn, these dive bar restrooms! There goes my cash; back to the bank. Maybe I’m just tired of Union Square. I shouldn’t take it out on this place which is just fine. Reasonable drink prices, great music if it isn’t repeated, and most importantly: space!
One side note: whenever you enter, you will feel a heated blast no matter what is going on outside.

Ample sized divey digs with a pool table and a killer music selection (Elvis Costello & The Clash).
There’s good pricings (re: cheap, $ 4 bud lights) and it’s right by the heart of Union Square. I’ve been here after work (sizable crowd) and in the later evening (great for catching up on some convos).
Easy, comfortable — definitely came over in here in jeans and some flats after a casual day at my internship. And I will be returning!

A real hole in the wall. I mean, there’s a hole in the wall.
119 gets kind of loud what with the bass from «The Filmore» fka Irving Plaza beating through the walls. The bathrooms are shit, the furniture is dilapidated and the place is really dark.
I almost didn’t think they had any beer on tap, but they’re beneath the bar in the middle room. A friend and I sat near the bathrooms on a couch and had a view of graffiti on the wall and Dirty Jerz stickers, instead of in a booth near the bar. The tunes are hit or miss, but really and truly, this place wasn’t crowded at all for a Saturday night and was pretty chill.

Dark
Dirty
Cheap prices
And a decent
Shot at having a strange story by night’s end.

Bar 119 is my go-​to pre-​party spot when I have tickets to a show at Irving Plaza, which is located around the corner.
This divey bar has a lodge-​like feel to it, with a pool table, some couches and stools, and weathered, wooden booths. Beers on tap are solid — Brooklyn Lager and Pilsner, Sierra, Ying, Sam, Guinness, Stella and Blue.
What I love most about this bar, though, is the music. It’s always loud and awesome … Pixies, Violent Femmes, Nirvana, Bowie, White Stripes…
Bar 119 has the BEST MUSIC of any bar in the city as far as I’m concerned. This unassuming place has soul.

This place is OK.
They have a pool table and some comfortably couches.
The table and seats by the bar is not comfortable, very squishy and the speaker above is very loud.

We didn’t stay here long enough for me to fully decide whether I liked it or not but that’s probably because it wasn’t the best place for a first date type thing…
That being said, maybe I’ve lowered my standards but it really didn’t seem that dirty. And the bartender made us drinks named after me. But, I think she does that for all the girls.

Not as gross as people say. Been in grosser and dirtier places.
Went in to have a beer with friends. Music was decent, not distractingly annoying, although pretty loud around the bar area, but not too loud in the back room, where we were, allowing us space to chat. Plenty of open space and good amount of seating.
I sat all night on this couch that was sinking in the middle and looked like the shabbiest thing ever. Still it was pretty cozy and oddly enough, I didn’t really think about it or get grossed about by it.

one of the dirtiest, smelliest dive bars I’ve ever been in. I can only imagine how many people have run away from this place. I like it. The crowd is friendly and the beer is reasonably priced.
The bathroom was so unbelievably disgusting, I had to take a photo. Doesn’t matter to me, but it must suck to be a woman in this place.

The fact that I thought 119 Bar was cool 10 years ago should warn you off it. I was about to turn 16. I have no idea whether the young set can still get in. But I know that prices at this dump have gone through the roof since the good old days. Sixteen bills for a double J&B is one thing if you’re hanging with the Anna Wintour set. But when you’re dealing with private school guttersnipes (and NYU «trash»), it’s not so cute. Sure, there’s graffiti everywhere, and, yeah, one time, some gross dude was having weird coital relations with another gross thing in the bathroom. But, really, unless your sole purpose in life is to accrue stories that you wouldn’t tell your parents, I can’t imagine any reason in the universe to patronize this fabricated «dive bar.»
I wouldn’t want to hang out with, or look at, the 16-​yr-​old version of myself. Especially at a bar. And while I can’t vouch for the fact that this demographic is still catered to at 119, you can rest assured that most of the people inside, no matter their chronological age, probably haven’t gone the week without telling their mothers to go fuck themselves. Oh, yeah, and The Clash? Nothing screams edge more.

119 nurtured me through my formative years as a bar back and floor guy at Irving Plaza. I was initiated into it’s secrets through older coworkers who may or may not have been sleeping with members of the bar staff. That’s the way it goes.
Make no mistakes, 119 is pretty divey. Ill lit, with a blaring rock soundtrack pumped through cheap speakers, it will leave you wanting more if you can handle it. The drinks are cheap and strong, the location is awesome.
They have a pool table in the front room, and the main room is very grungy. Shaky little booths line the walls, some of them unlit entirely. Hanky panky anyone? The back room adjacent to the disgusting bathrooms has couches in it … hanky panky anyone? Gross. You don’t want to know what’s on those things.
In the old days this place didn’t have the fancy little outer door thingy, it was just a place you kind of had to *know* was there. There was nary a neon sign to be seen through the darkly tinted windows. Now that there is a door there I predict NYU/​New School students will be coming soon in droves.

Once upon a time, there was a dotcom company. The employees worked many, many long hours, and when they weren’t working, they came to 119 to lose themselves in the darkness of the bar, the bottle, or both. Their successes, failures, and heck, even some of their product ideas, were all discussed or hatched at 119.
I joined said dotcom several years later, and was introduced to 119 as «the place we used to go to a lot». We still went there once in a while, sure, but things just weren’t the same.
Nowadays, 119 still has all the basics of what made it such a hip yet non-​trendy dive bar (cheap drinks, bad lighting, and ick, those bathrooms), it’s definitely become better known. I read that even the famous (is Drew Barrymore considered famous?) have been known to drop by.
A recent email about a going away party for a former coworker reminded me that 119 definitely deserves a review, though I now live too far away to call myself a customer.