Neighborhood Crawl: Lincoln Park

Cleveland, Ohio

A Piece of Cleveland History

In the shadow of Cleveland’s trendy Tremont neighborhood, Lincoln Park plays antidote, offering up some of the oldest and best dive bars in the city. The area is unmistakably residential, more a loosely connected string of businesses than a true commercial district, and that’s the source of much of the area’s charm, where these classic haunts have been embedded into organic fabric of the neighborhood for a very long time.

The gem of the area is undoubtedly Hotz Café, a bar opened in 1919 that still features original stools and a vintage bowling game every bit the start of the show inside. The bar is so woven into the fabric of Cleveland that Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth and FDR all drank there, occupying those very same stools. That’s the kind of history that can be found in Cleveland, and the Lincoln Park area is one of those places where you can certainly feel the weight of that heritage.

The Tremont neighborhood’s proximity makes Lincoln Park a natural jumping off point for the more densely populated Tremont district of bars & restaurants. Edison’s Pub is suggested here as the natural transition point, but Lincoln Park stands ably on its own, a string of history-rich slices of Cleveland’s past that need no second course.

The Stops

1. Tremont Taphouse

2572 Scranton Rd, Cleveland, OH 44113

Like so many of Cleveland’s great destinations, Tremont Tap House is a classic, near-vintage pub experience. The interior is easy to picture, a long wooden bar, a series of booths along the opposite wall, a robust beer menu, chalkboards. And the pub manages to avoid feeling generic, instead feeling welcoming, unpretentious. Across a dividing highway from Lincoln Park proper, Tremont provides a great starting point, or evening capper.

2. Grumpy's Cafe

2621 W 14th St, Cleveland, OH 44113

Now if the occasion calls for a little day drinking, Grumpy’s Café can be the more appropriate starting point for laying a generous foundation of breakfast and lunch diner classics. Open until 2p, the Grumpy’s Café menu features everything you picture it would, from a series of Benedict offerings to the type of burger that can soak up, or prepare for, an evening of drinking.

3. Lincoln Park Pub

2609 W 14th St, Cleveland, OH 44113

Lincoln Park Pub is less a dive bar and more a neighborhood meeting place that happens to get people drunk in the process. The space feels like a natural extension of the residential area that surrounds it, and given it’s only a few steps away from a Grumpy’s Café brunch, serves as the real launching point for an exploration of the area.

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4. Prosperity Social Club

2624 Commerce St, Dallas, TX 75226

While featuring a robust brunch menu of their own, Prosperity Social Club is the dive bar, vintage tavern version of Grumpy’s food-only offering. There are few places that feel more like Cleveland than Prosperity, an exterior that looks like a stone fortress and an interior inundated with P.O.C. neon, an ode to Cleveland’s rich history in beer production (and, by association, consumption).

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5. Hotz Cafe

2529 W 10th St, Cleveland, OH 44113

Hotz is the unquestioned gem of the area, a Cleveland dive bar institution that first opened its doors in 1919. With over 100 years under its belt and original fixtures to match (notably the stools around the bar), every ounce of the bar’s history can be felt during an night of drinking. Cleveland dive bar staple, the old-school bowling arcade machine, is probably best exemplified by Hotz’s entry, a mammoth and beautiful machine that commands the front and only room within.

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6. Edison's Pub

Edison’s is the Tremont / Lincoln Park connector of sorts, the most laid back and dive-like bar within the Tremont stretch that extends a handful of densely-packed blocks along Professor Avenue. While the grunge factor of a typical dive bar is largely absent from Edison’s, the colorful but unpretentious interior provides that right kind of transition into some of the ritzier options nearby.

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