While this reviewer couldn’t personally confirm whether the bar that runs along one side of the narrow space is original, the wood certainly seems to fit the bill, the kind of short lip, bump your knees against the wall orientation typical of vintage dive bars. Demonstrating the tight dimensions found throughout Sligo Pub, there is room here for only eight stools or so, a short stretch in comparison to the long bar behind it. A shallow, built-in bookcase of sorts provides the structure behind the bar to host liquor bottles, the classic dive bar mirror behind one section. It is easy to picture these shelves hosting bottles of all description over the decades, the wood the perfectly aged backdrop for the liquor.
With such a broad display of bottles, little room is left for other decorations, or even glasses. The narrow confines behind the bar make for creative space management, every inch behind, below and even in the window well attached to the bar utilized for the glassware and accessories keep a dive bar like Sligo Pub running. Opposite the bar, a handful of short tables provide the bar’s main seating area, a short stretch of stools and tables underneath a classic dive bar set of beer signs. Notable is the Budweiser Clydesdale display that resembles a short of ship-in-a-bottle approach, a vintage item among some of the newer Guinness and Harpoon signage nearby.
A trained eye is needed to hunt down of the other vintage items inside, including a framed sketch of the bar’s narrow exterior just behind the bar. Sligo Pub-themed items through the years can be found here and there, mixed in and around a set of newer objects, an example of the living nature of Sligo Pub all these decades later. In back, carving can be found all along the wood walls here, countless generations leaving a very tangible mark on Sligo Pub. In fact, though most of the bar itself has been spared, the wood surfaces through Sligo Pub bear some type of etched marking that lets some of Sligo Pub’s deep roots shine through.