A Boxing Shrine Two Blocks Off Times Square
A narrow dive on West 44th where the walls are papered in Ali fight posters. The last true dive in the neighborhood, and everyone knows it.
The autographed dollar bills pinned behind the back bar are the first tell — singles, fives, tens, signatures faded under decades of cigarette smoke that has technically not been legal since 2003. Above them, Muhammad Ali. Ali and Frazier. Jimmy Glenn with fighters whose names you may or may not know, depending on how deep you go on boxing. The room is narrow and the stools are close together.
Jimmy Glenn opened the place in 1971, when West 44th Street between Sixth and Seventh was not what it is now. Glenn was a boxer, a cutman, a trainer, and ran a gym upstairs from various Times Square addresses for decades. He built Jimmy's Corner as a working bar for working people — fighters, stagehands, the theater district's off-shift crowd — and the bar has held that line while every block around it turned into a Bubba Gump. Recent coverage has been ambivalent about whether the bar's future is secure; there is talk of a push to save it. Go now, on that basis alone.
The last real bar in Times Square, and the only one where the walls are worth reading between rounds.
Editorial Deep
Cheap well drinks and cheap beer are the entire pitch. Order a vodka soda, a rum and coke, a whiskey ginger — anything that lives in the well — and you will get it strong, cold, over plenty of ice, and back in front of you in under a minute. Ask nicely and a candied cherry lands in the glass. That is the extent of the flourish.
At 5pm on a weekday the front bar is half-full of people who work in the neighborhood, the light through the door is still doing something, and you can read the wall. The boxing memorabilia is the room — Ali posters, framed fight cards, Jimmy Glenn shaking hands with people you recognize and people you don't, the dollar bills behind the back bar signed by whoever passed through and wanted to leave a mark. Raging Bull shot here. It looks it.
The room reads local in a way almost nothing else in a four-block radius does — theater staff coming off shift, office workers a train stop from Grand Central, boxing tourists who know exactly why they crossed town, and a scattering of in-the-know visitors who did their reading. It is not a scene, and it is not trying to be. The energy is loud, friendly, unbothered by whoever else is standing next to you, and the bartenders talk to everyone the same way. Nobody is waiting on your stool as long as you keep ordering, and nobody minds if you do.
Drinks here are cheap by Midtown standards, and that is the standing price, not a happy-hour trick. The nearest hotel bar will charge four times that for drinks that are not four times better, and the tourist traps on Seventh Avenue will charge more than that for one cocktail served in a plastic cup. Tip generously. The math still works. The one thing to know: cash is safer than assuming a card works.
This is the best version of the last-dive-in-Times-Square, and there is not a close second within a fifteen-minute walk. Come back on a Wednesday around 6pm before a show, or after one around 11, and sit at the bar long enough to read the walls properly. The night that does not work: a big group who wants a table, food, and a cocktail menu. Jimmy's does none of those things, and if that is what you want, the block is full of places built to sell it to you at a markup.
Order this
Drink this.
A well drink — strong pour, candied cherry if you ask nicely
“The last real dive in Times Square.”
Go on a weekday before 6pm or a weeknight after 11, sit at the bar, and read the walls. Order well drinks and beer; skip the food and skip the idea of a cocktail. Not the move for a group of six who want to sit down.
The Verdict
