What is Pattie’s First Avenue Lounge?
Old Town Scottsdale spends a lot of money looking old. Pattie’s First Avenue Lounge never had to. It sits a few doors east of Scottsdale Road at 7220 E 1st Ave, in the block of turquoise shops and Western-wear windows that visitors walk between lunch and the galleries, and you get in through what Experience Scottsdale accurately called “a literal hole-in-the-wall”: an opening in weather-worn brick.
Inside, it is three bars in one. A side room holds the pool table and the games, including the ping-pong table Phoenix New Times named the Valley’s best in 2016. The middle is an open-air alley of high-tops, roofed by vines rather than a ceiling. The main room has the long bar, the regulars and the decor, which consists almost entirely of dollar bills: thousands of them, decorated and fixed to the ceiling and every available surface, an estimated $5,000-plus that the bartenders call the bar’s 401(k).
The name on the sign has been Pattie’s since 1992. Before that the room was Gordy’s, and New Times found regulars who had been coming since it went by that name. The crowd is the mixed bag every real dive collects: millionaires, spring-training visitors, bachelorette parties that took a wrong turn, and people who have owned buildings on the block for decades.
There is no food worth mentioning and no jukebox. It does not need either. In our guide to Scottsdale dive bars Pattie’s is the Old Town survivor between the Coach House on Indian School and the Rusty Spur on Main, and the cheapest drink within a mile.
How to drink at Pattie’s
Go early in the day. Pattie’s opens in the morning and pours until 2 a.m., seven days, and the weekday afternoon is its best hour: sun through the open-air middle section, a bartender with time to talk, and a pool table nobody is waiting on. A weekend DJ makes the place louder and younger after dark; that version is fun, but it is a different bar.
Order simply. A domestic longneck, a well drink, a shot. The price of those drinks is the reason locals come, and a cocktail with a garnish is the fastest way to mark yourself as lost. There are a few interesting beers at the main bar if you ask what is on.
Play something. Pool in the side room, the ping-pong table that won New Times’ citation, shuffleboard when it is free. Carry small bills: the games, the tip jar and the bartender all appreciate cash, and if you want to add your own dollar to the ceiling, ask the bartender first.
Eat before or after. Next door, Cien Agaves does tacos and a hundred-bottle agave list; across the street, Hula’s Modern Tiki does the rum drinks Pattie’s will not. After midnight, our late-night food guide is the plan. Park in the free Old Town garages and walk; First Avenue has almost no street parking on a busy night.
The dive in the gift-shop block
First Avenue between Scottsdale Road and Brown Avenue is one of the most touristed blocks in Old Town. It is where visitors buy turquoise, Pendleton blankets at Pendleton Old Town, and wildlife bronzes at Grey Wolf Gallery, a short walk from the 1920s buildings on Brown Avenue. That a bar papered in dollar bills has survived in the middle of it since the early 1990s says something about how the block actually works: the shopkeepers, gallery staff and bartenders who keep it running need somewhere to drink too.
The 1990s were the decade Old Town’s nightlife moved north. The clubs and big rooms clustered around Stetson Drive and later Indian Plaza, and the money followed them. The small bars south of Indian School that served the old downtown were left alone, which is the only reason any of them survive. The Coach House, open since 1959, and the Rusty Spur, pouring since 1951, are the other two Old Town rooms that made it; Pattie’s is the youngest of the three and it has kept the same name, the same three rooms and the same habit of hanging money from the ceiling ever since.
What it offers is the thing the entertainment district cannot sell: a room nobody designed. The decor accumulated one dollar bill at a time. The regulars’ stools are theirs by attrition. The games are there because someone once bought a ping-pong table and it turned out people liked it.
Honest assessment: Pattie’s is not for everyone. It is loud on weekend nights, there is no food, and the decor is not ironic. But for a cheap drink and a game of pool in a room that has looked the same for more than thirty years, there is nowhere better in Old Town.