Indian Room

Ok. Here is an update. The place just got ruined. The outside Indian Room sign is gone, the classic Indian mural is gone. The «dive» as left and what is in its place is your run of the mill, wanna be, hipster hangout. The best jukebox in San Pedro has been replaced by a digital juke. The place lost all its character as well as the characters who used to frequent it. I’ve spent my last dollar here. It’s called Augies but you might as well call it dead.

True dive

Classic dive bar. Strong cheap drinks and a jukebox (not the digital kind) with Johnny Cash tunes. Nuff said!!! What more do you need???

I carry a notebook, dark brown leather… the edges worn and somewhat bare… on the front, a hand tooled image of a tree in full bloom… it reminds me of Nick Drake.
I found it at a thrift store in Leesburg, Virginia when I was 14 years old… often I hold it up to my nose and breathe in deeply… the faint smell of revolution and protest… pre-​disco days lingering.
I carry it everywhere… you never know when a random brilliant thought will form itself in your mind. I’ve always cursed when this happens in the middle of the night — I’m suddenly awake with one line of prose stuck in my head… an eagerness to jot it down before the words begin to jumble like alphabet soup and it fades away into the darkness of the night.
I smiled knowingly as I sat at the bar of the Indian Room … I reached into my bag and embraced my notebook with both hands… thankful it was with me. I felt at one with my surroundings… partly, no doubt because I have Navajo blood pumping through my veins… It wasn’t just that, though… it wasn’t. I couldn’t forget the slightest detail.
I had found a paradigmatic dive. Beautiful.
There is a stretch of Pacific Ave in San Pedro that has managed to remain as it was in the 30s and 40s… many of the buildings lining the street still alight from neon signage beckoning patronage… boarded buildings whose heyday was that of another decade, possibly another century…
The Indian Room’s own neon sign spells out the establishment in a font distinctively 1930s and the head of an Indian warrior sits atop in blue, yellow, and red…
The bar itself is quaint… there are maybe a dozen and a half stools surrounding the old rich, wooden bar… we sat in the middle to take it all in… Not much has changed since it first opened in 1936. The silver hardware on the cabinet doors behind the bar and the old wooden push button cash register confirm this… as well as the Cigar Store Indian that guards the door when ya walk in…
There are several pieces of vintage Native Americana in the bar… a small collection sits on the far left side of the bar, including an almost life-​size bust of a warrior… and several spears and Dream Catchers hang behind the bar…
My favorite is the mural painted high on the back wall… It depicts an Indian warrior on a horse, riding into an unknown battle… and if you look close enough you can see a bullet hole (the real deal) marring the body of the horse. One of the regular patrons mentioned a bar fight but he did so, smiling as if to say «That sorta thing doesn’t happen here often…»
In fact, I imagine it doesn’t. There were only a few others in the bar that day… locals who knew the bartender well enough to exchange conversation… teasingly.
Our bartender was a sweet woman named Ingrid… she approached us with a smile… This is often a scarce gesture when you’re not a regular … San Pedro is still beachy, though… despite the looming port of industry… Ingrid wasn’t put off by my request for a Bloody Mary. She seemed happy, almost eager to make something other than the standard whisky and soda…
I have always measured the value of a dive by the ability to concoct a Bloody Mary.
It seems easy enough… (you’re probably thinking)… but it ain’t.
It takes skill to make a good Bloody Mary… a skill that booze aficionados are born with. Ingrid’s Bloody Mary was perfect… just the right amount of horseradish, Worcestershire Sauce, pepper, and garnished with two olives, a cocktail onion and lime. Yum.
A round of two drinks was $ 10. Yep, ten bucks!
I will definitely be back to visit the Indian Room… and oh yeah — they have Happy Hour on Tuesdays from 8am-​11am… if that ain’t a sign that it’s a true dive… I don’t think one exists.

As bars of the dive variety are, drinks here are reasonable and no frills. Alice was behind the bar one Sunday night. Multiplicity of nearby street parking with security cams pointed to the street, so we could see that our car was still where we parked it. However, this made us wonder what kind of place we were in that had security cams situated thusly. The place is clean.
The women’s restroom has a «Love Kits» vending machine. Receive a surprise for 50 cents.