Clockwork Bar

New York, New York

Field Note

Clockwork Bar on New York City’s Lower East Side is basically the movie-grade version of a dive bar, down to the stickers and graffiti that cover every inch of the bar’s slender space. Maybe more accurately, Clockwork Bar looks the result of taking a classic dive bar bathroom, extending its dimensions and adding a bar toward the front. The result is an intimidatingly dense dive bar jungle, even by New York standards.

Opened in 2013, Clockwork Bar is a fresh addition to the New York dive bar scene in relative terms, more an intentional creation than a decades-old urban bar refusing to change. To that point, Clockwork Bar is part of a triumvirate of New York dive bars stitched together by common ownership, a set that includes Strangelove and Lucky Lyndon. But any bar with the slogan “Cretins Welcome” certainly qualifies as a stop on any dive bar tour, even in a city as packed with options as New York.

Billed as the “World’s Favorite Punk Rock Dive,” the moniker fits the vibe, the relentless layers of stickers, graffiti and deep red lighting conspiring to create an intensely dim drinking environment. Visited during the day, Clockwork Bar is an almost overwhelming explosion of color across all of the bar’s surfaces. Seen at night, red overhead lighting washes out some of the color, but accentuates the truly chaotic nature of the bar’s decorations.

The red glow inside spills out onto Essex Street thanks to an array of neon that dots the bar’s exterior, ranging from the name of the bar inscribed along the front window to a very clear, very directive sign above the front door that reads “BAR” in bright, red lettering. Given the design choices inside and outside of Clockwork Bar, the basement bathroom decor will come as no surprise, the graffiti here simply a payoff on the promise written by the bar’s interior & exterior design choices.

When the weather cooperates, the front windows of the Clockwork Bar space fold up to be slid aside, leaving a beer ledge perfect for day drinking at the front of the bar. The shotgun-style space fits only a handful of stools along Clockwork Bar’s small counter, a few steps leading up to a long room with sporadic low tables. Almost hidden is another room in the right rear corner of Clockwork Bar, a graffiti-lined alcove almost claustrophobic in its sticker-graffiti inundation.

Because the bar’s front windows are caked with stickers, when the windowed doors are closed at the front of Clockwork Bar, drinking inside feels a bit like drinking in a large walk-in closet. Devoid of not just outside light but also the suggestion that anything exists at all past the front door, Clockwork Bar becomes a graffiti-lined shoebox that happens to include beer & shot combos and happy hour pricing. Liquor bottles are perched on shallow, built-in ledges behind the bar, one of the few interior accents not made out of stickers or graffiti.