The Danny's Ranking System

My favorite-now-shuttered bar remains the standard. So from 0% to 100% Danny's Tavern, where does your bar belong?

Meme courtesy of Instagram. IDK who made it but if you made it LMK.

Without Danny, I’m aimless. Without Danny, I’m an outlaw in the Wild West, left with my trusty horse (public transit) and a flask of whiskey (cheap tequila). Without Danny, I’m a ghost left to live out eternity on Earth waiting for her love (a great and reliable bar) who was lost at sea (bankruptcy or something¹) and will never return. Without Danny, I’m living the Wanderer’s journey, what Google defines as “a heroic adventure, a quest for one's own identity. Willing to choose authenticity over almost everything — security, relationships, perhaps even life itself,” except I’m not living out an Odysseus-like escapade. I don’t have a cool sword. I haven’t tricked a Cyclops, or been seduced by Circe, there are no sirens, just sweaty people in bars and hot people I’m too afraid to talk to.

Instead I’m typing away feverishly (seriously, I have a cold) and begging for the time before. The time before Danny’s Tavern closed. When everything was alright and society was how it should be, even though I was dumber a lot more then and probably a lot more hungover too. I might be better off today, but three years ago (or almost four, if I’m doing my math right), when Danny’s closed for good, you could say that a sliver of Chicago’s hopes and dreams² died with it. Ask anyone who’s ever been there and I know they’ll agree.

The truth is that it’s hard to talk about any bar or club these days without name-dropping Danny’s. After having moved to New York, I assume that people either think I’m a lunatic or know me well enough to know it’s unavoidable, as it’s seemingly taken over an entire section of my Frontal Lobe.

Anatomically accurate brain scan of my brain

For those unfamiliar: Danny’s was my favorite place to go for any reason and easily so: it was rock-solid, a cozy neighborhood dive bar nestled between the workers cottages and bungalows of Bucktown, a Northside neighborhood just adjacent to Wicker Park and the expressway. Above the standout black door hung a Schlitz³ beer sign that glowed red at night and in the summers was encased in thick green ivy. A mere 30-minute walk away from my apartment, the perfect distance for walking off the last few hours of a sweaty night spent dancing, or for catching the breeze in my hair during the bike ride to-and-fro, or if I was lucky, the distance worth winning a goodbye kiss.

And lucky I was, not for goodbye kisses, but for Danny, who was only ever humble to me. The bar never had a cover and was always cash only — you didn’t expect much from it and it didn’t expect much from you, just to be a good patron. If you knew Danny, you knew the small, candlelit rooms that made it feel both small and big, you knew that it felt like being at home, if not yours then somebody else’s, a kind stranger. I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a fireplace, tucked away in the back for the coldest winters, but that’s just a dream.

Vinyl-only DJs hosted weeknight dance events, like Hot On The Heels (every first Tuesday of the month for synths, drum machines and techno) and Night Moves (70s & 80s PARTY MUSIC, NEW AND OLD, BOOGIE FUNK, ACID, MODERN SOUL, DISCO, HOUSE, ITALO AND BEYOND, the inspiration for my ever-growing Spotify dance playlist). But you could expect a similar boogie-forward tracklist on any night, just like you could usually expect to run into someone you knew. In the best way, living in the third-largest US city often felt especially small.

Post-closing. October 2020?

After Danny’s closed and I moved away from Chicago, I realized something: it’s one thing to have a community, but it’s another to be able to centralize it. For me, it started with Danny’s and seemingly has ended with Danny’s (you’ll learn more why). From the moment I stepped foot inside for the first time, a night which I actually don’t remember. You know a place is special when you have no documentation of it, just your memories and maybe a blurry photo of the floor. While Danny himself is ultimately irreplaceable⁴, all we can do is learn from his existence.

Thus I present to you The Danny’s-O-Meter, a ranking system that rates all sorts of places by the very standards Danny maintained so well. I rate bars (and other venues) on The Danny’s-O-Meter with five key elements in mind: Accessibility, Danceability, Crowd Commitment, Versatility, Purpose. Read on below and you’ll learn more about The Danny’s-O-Meter and why these five elements are important. I’ll also go into a “brief and personal history,” for this is personal, although who's to say if it’s actually brief. Memory feels like a lifetime. We can all learn so much from it.

As updated April 1, 2024*** The Danny’s Scale made by me. A handful of memorable establishments located in Chicago and New York City, my two stomping grounds. Don’t forget - ratings are always changing!

---

I don’t remember my first night at Danny’s, but I could tell you about most nights after — from DISCO COSMIC BOOGIE ACID BEYOND. ALL WAX. FREE ENTRY. CHEAP DRINKS. 21+, to throwing wads of wet toilet paper up onto the bathroom ceiling, to who was making out with who in the back room on the leather couches, to running into someone’s ex or worse, nemesis, to even better—who snuck in a whole case of beer past the bouncer one night that one summer, to the guy who asked me if I was goth (I was wearing a necklace made out of Home Depot chain link metal so you can answer that yourself), to arguments that started from the sidewalk out front and stretched into the streets of Wicker Park past 3am. I lived and breathed Danny’s in college and I want to love something like that again.

These days my friends will ask me, so what’s your favorite bar now? and it’s hard to respond with confidence. To me, having a favorite bar means being a regular. But what happens when you live a 30-to 50-minute train commute to any of those favorite places? How frequently can you realistically centralize yourself to a destination that is otherwise random? Can you really know the place and its patrons if you don’t? Can you claim it? I want to be a regular at my favorite bar. I want due diligence, but I’m not sure I’ll get it.

Part of me is afraid that my wanting to be a regular at a bar is really just rooted in selfishness, the selfishness to find a replacement Danny’s because I can’t accept letting it go and would be better off if I did; that there will simply be nothing like it again. I’m scared that this selfishness is stopping me from accepting the decisions I’ve made (moving to New York) and accepting my reality (not living in a young, happening neighborhood where both my friends and bars are mere blocks away). But maybe this is just the New York way. And for someone who loves to be in the middle of everything, maybe I just have to move. Are we really ever 100% satisfied anyways? Am I? I suppose I’m someone always looking for something more.

Then there’s the other fear, which is worse. That wanting Danny’s to live on is really just a pathetic excuse for missing my early twenties, in the way that some adults might bemoan as ‘the most fun time of your life and you’ll never get it back!’⁵ Was it coincidence that Danny’s closing aligned with not just COVID, but my college graduation⁶ as well? There was no farewell party or last call, no goodbyes, no grief, no burying the hatchet. Instead we were left to fend for ourselves, along with the rest of the world. Like my graduation, which was virtual, the news of Danny’s official shutdown and community reaction resorted to scatterings of online articles and odes by local artists, proof that something had existed once so fully and now didn’t and we couldn’t do anything about it and what would it be like after?

But this isn’t some desperation for college nostalgia, this is a fraught search for community. Community may be harder to find outside of school spaces, but places like Danny’s existed to maintain community. While I was dancing at Danny’s in college, so were my older friends, navigating their mid-20s like I am now. They experienced Danny’s as I did, living their own adult lives. Evidence that their experiences then could be parallel to my present one, evidence that community does exist in adulthood and can and should and must. That after school, after you pass the legal drinking age, life is only supposed to get more exciting, more interesting, more complicated — you are supposed to become more and more alive, not the other way around.

Back then, during the p*ndemic, the only way I could prove Danny’s was truly closed was by biking past on occasion, yanking on the locked door in hopes that for some reason it would open, peeking through the clouded window only to see the bar smeared with dust, bottles of liquor intact and leftover, and spy one last ray of receding sunlight that snuck in from outside through all the grime. Then, bike away, wonder where the neon Schlitz sign hanging outside gone and hope it was somewhere better, being used for all its glory. If only I’d been given a timely warning, I would’ve chained myself to the front doors in protest. In many ways, the band-aid was ripped off clean.

If Danny’s was still open now, I do believe it would be exactly the same. I believe we would’ve returned there post-lockdown in celebratory joy, just like we would now if it miraculously reopened. I’d know disco dancing again. I’d bring my parents. And if anything were to be different, which is surely possible, it would be just me, knowing that once I moved away and returned to visit, I’d be seeing it with a fresh set of eyes, absolving and accepting change as you should when you grow up. If only Danny Cimaglio knew what a landmark he created back in 1986. If only the current owners knew what damage they’ve done and what damage persists, seeing as nothing new has opened in its place. It lives as a ghost, full of our memories.

So here we are, the Danny’s-O-Meter. Learn more below:

---

HOW DANNY’S IS YOUR ESTABLISHMENT?

The five main components of The Danny’s-O-Meter are:

1. Accessibility — literally and figuratively. Who is this place for? Would you feel comfortable bringing your parents here, or people who hate dancing, and could you convince them to love dancing? Are people giving you the stank face when you walk in the door? Is it ADA-accessible? (Danny’s had like, 1 step up, so maybe not entirely, but you get the gist). Is the bouncer being choosy? Is there a fuckload of security? How is the seating? Is there a dress code? IS IT AFFORDABLE? Danny’s had no cover, an ATM inside and drinks were like $4-$11. This is all to say, accessibility matters. Before Danny’s closed for good, I had been planning to take my mom for her birthday (one of the big ones).

2. Danceability — Can you dance at this place? How’s the music? If this place isn't really for dancing, could you dance if you wanted? If so, what’s great or not so great about the dance floor? Is there one at all? Or would you be ogled if you started dancing here? These days I’ve realized that being able to go to a shitty bar where you can also dance is a rarity. Danny’s dance floor was the size of a standard living room, and on a good night was packed. People were committed (see #3 below). You could dance right in front of the DJs while they picked through their record selection. An AC unit blasted ice cold air from one side of the room, making it easy to stay cool in the summer. Another wall led to the doors to the bathroom, while the rest of the space spilled into rooms with seating for when you were ready for a break. Not every night was a perfect one, but you could always expect most genres of music, mixed to a near-perfect medley.

1. Crowd Commitment — There’s nothing more painful than going out to a social event where the crowd is just not committed. This is Charli XCX trying to hype up the crowd at a music festival in Germany. This is those guys on Halloween wearing a shirt that says “THIS T-SHIRT IS MY COSTUME.” At Danny’s, you could bet that most of the crowd was committed. Neighborhood business owners on a night off could be seen sitting at the bar in animated conversation. College students and bachelorette parties thrashed to MIA and Parliament Funkadelic under the disco ball in harmony, shaking the wooden floor. Musicians sauntered in after playing a show at one of the nearby venues to nurse a beer in the back room. Even squads of blonde Eastern-European men, who were often universally creepy, liked to sit on the leather bench sidelines, watch the dance floor and say, “Hello you pretty girl, can I buy you a drink?” Even on an empty, quiet Sunday night, you could ensure that the few patrons played their parts well, that you could always find a small group of friends dancing together in a circle on the dance floor, grateful for the space to escape, like I did.

2. Versatility — Whatever this space is, whoever it’s made for, what can you do here and is it working? There’s a fine line when it comes to versatility. A space shouldn’t be so multifaceted otherwise it loses meaning. You can’t have everything and have it be 100% effective. Many bars I’ve been to are either missing the mark by a hair or leaping through rings of fire and being set on fire. How can you go get a drink with friends at a bar that is also in fact a restaurant, but not only that, the DJ is blasting music so loud you can’t hear yourself speak, but no one’s dancing either and the dance floor isn’t actually a dance floor because there isn’t actually a dance floor, and while you’re at it, you can also watch a movie playing with subtitles projected on a wall while people play pool?⁷ Danny’s was versatile in the way that it did two things well and stuck to them, which was being a reliable neighborhood bar and a reliable place to dance. A bar is a bar is a bar with a dance floor is a club is a dive bar, y’know? Kind of like this famous Magritte.

3. Purpose — What’s the whole point of this place? Of course, most higher-up establishments exist with a universal capitalistic intent: business ventures peddling entertainment to seek a profit. So then what’s keeping them open? During its 34-year run, Danny’s was a heartfelt affordable dive bar loved by many that still fought rumors of closure. But the truth remains: it was a staple made for a beloved community — a space made for drinking and dancing, no pressure to be cool or young or rich. Danny’s lived so strongly, so well, that its community still feels tangible today.

---

It’s my hope that you have a type of Danny somewhere in your life, regardless if your Danny is a bar or a person or a conglomeration of both, a personification as I have made it (him). Maybe your Danny’s is your own favorite bar that also closed during COVID and you too haven’t moved past it. Maybe your Danny’s is also Danny’s. Or maybe, if you’re lucky, your Danny’s is still around; reliable, welcoming, alive.

If you’re a soul-searcher like I am, be sure to use The Danny’s-O-Meter when you’re out bar-hopping, or even cater it to your own set of guidelines. Regardless of the standards you use to measure, The Danny’s-O-Meter, as made by me, is the standardized test for all that’s true, the most public space where you can be your most unforgivable, most honest you. I do believe there’s bar for me out there. Somewhere humble, not somewhere to be humbled. We should be so lucky to all have a place like that.

PART 2: Read New York’s Top #4 — some standout NYC locales worth a review.

1. I don’t actually know why Danny’s closed. The space is still vacant.

2. In terms of nightlife

3. Shout out to Milwaukee, WI for being a TOP BEER CITY! I’ve still never been tho (embarrassing)

4. Unless the new owners decide to make what would be the best decision known to all of Chicago and probably mankind, which is to reopen Danny’s.

5. Obviously, this statement is so nuanced

6. Or lack thereof, considering school was shut down indefinitely

7. Abe’s Pagoda call out