Lincoln Park Dive Bar Guide

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.