In the grand tradition of dive bars inside bowling alleys, there’s just something about the combination of a laundromat and an inexpensive spot to grab a beer while waiting. New Orleans has
Igor’s Lounge & Gameroom and Columbus Dirty Dungaree’s, an Ohio State campus-adjacent institution that exists on an endless loop of bewildered discovery and pleasant surprise.
Just a few blocks north of Ohio State’s main campus sits Dirty Dunagrees in a faded, almost-crumbling-but-not-quite building easy to miss on a first trip along High Street. The phrase “Dry Cleaning Coin Laundry & Pub” isn’t a typical description to encounter, but such as is depiction on the Dirty Dunagrees Columbus sign, paired with the peerless motto “a fun place to do your laundry.” This Dirty Dunagrees location was once part of a modest-sized chain in central Ohio but stands today as the lone survivor.
Opened in 1978, cycles of students and locals have shuffled through Dirty Dungarees often to do some laundry and sometimes to grab a beer. For many students, Senior Crawl Night is the first encounter with Dirty Dunagrees when streams of graduating students file up and down High Street, grabbing a drink at every possible destination. Where the Columbus dive bar packs in ten or so people on a typical evening, crawl night can bring as many as 300 people in a handful of hours.
The building’s exterior pairs large, open windows with the laundromat side of the building before ratcheting down the available sunlight a few notches by transitioning into opaque glass blocks on the bar side of the structure. Inside, the division is obvious, a bank of dryers on one wall, washers in the middle, lightly divided bar along the opposite wall. The odd trash can or coin-operated attraction may fill in a corner here and there, but this is as basic a laundromat as it gets.
The magic, naturally, happens on the drinking side of the structure, where a short bar is divided from the laundromat by an open wall. Festivities within this corner of Dirty Dungarees have shifted over the years, most notably when ex-owner Drew Sherrick purchased the Columbus dive bar in 2015. After being recorded as saying “I don’t want to be a venue,” Dirty Dungarees morphed into just that, a potent live music venue known for punk, hardcore, metal and experimental acts happy to deal with early closing hours (as early as 9 PM most days).
After booking bands at Oldfield’s on High, a now defunct cousin of dive bar brethren
Oldfield’s North Fourth Tavern, Sherrick used his experience to gradually work into what is now a schedule that can include as many as three or four live bands a week. Sherrick sold Dirty Dungarees in 2023 to an unnamed set of owners who have made a few light updates thus far while leaning into the music reputation Dirty Dungarees has developed unique to Columbus’ other options. Still alive and well are the stained glass lamps above the booths that sit just behind the bar, though the evolution of the space feels very much a work in progress. A limited set of draft beer options accompany liquor basics and a refrigerator full of dive bar-favorite beverages.
The Dirty Dungarees stage is really just a part of the building without anything else going on, live acts huddled into a corner of open floor space. For the student-friendly, hardcore-leaning bands that cycle through Dirty Dungarees, the simplicity of the setup only adds to the experience, creating the kind of bond unique to a live music space where band and spectator exist on eye level. A hint of that connection is available to mere mortals every Tuesday thanks to a rotating karaoke night that sets up in the same dusty corner of the Columbus campus dive bar.
