Jimmy’s Corner
Theater District
140 W. 44th St.
New York, NY 10036
(212) 221-9510
It was my first time in New York City and I stayed at the Intercontinental on 48th St.. Only two hours into Times Square and I was already electronically hungover. Don’t get me wrong, at the start I had worn my tourist fanny pack with pride, sitting in Duffy Square with a skewer of Brazilian steak, listening to acoustic sets by a handicapped, chonie-clad patriot with a guitar. I even gave improper directions to a tourist! But as time went on I noticed I was no longer waiting for crosswalks and WHY THE HELL MUST YOU WALK THE ENTIRE WIDTH OF THE SIDEWALK? I had my bearings (apparently) and it was time to explore.
To a tourist drinker, the first eight hours in a city is crucial: spend too much time in one bar and you haven’t explored the city, spend too little time at many bars and the experience is, well, hazy to say the least.
But this was New York, right? Time to go overboard. I started my walkabout in Lansdowne Road at 43rd and 10th and eventually ended up at the Blind Tiger on Bleeker in the West Village, covering more than 40 blocks on foot. It was amazing. Simple conversations at even simpler locations, met up with friends, ate a Black Iron burger, hopping from bar to bar with Frogger-like precision, but by night’s end the beverages had taken their toll and I was no longer landing on the lily pads. It was time to head home.
After arriving at the hotel, I exited the cab and noticed a literal hole in the wall under a nondescript maroon awning, the entrance to Jimmy’s Corner. I could go for a nightcap. Hell, I can always go for a nightcap. But this drink would turn out to be so much more. Little did I know after ten stops in the city, I was home. 
The long, narrow bar was lined with quilted memories of boxing’s past, but it is by no means cut-and-paste memorabilia. Pictures are tagged and mounted like taxidermy and it’s poignant, a family album of sorts, like the difference between dining under rusty Radio Flyer at Bennigan’s and snorkeling the Great Barrier Reef; you look at this place with sincere interest. And there’s a historical smell in the air, one of wet dust and bleached pleather. It was obvious that the place was cleaned with elbow grease for elbow greasers, a bar for citizenry.
I sidled slyly up to the bar and took a seat next to a peppery older man with a genuine smile not knowing he was the owner, Jimmy Glenn. Jimmy has worked in boxing most of his life. He’s trained at-risk youth in Harlem and worked as a cut man for boxing greats Michael Spinks and Floyd Patterson (He even lost some teeth to Patterson as an amateur fighter). And the picture of Glenn shaking hands with Muhammed Ali should let you know he’s something serious, if only for shaking hands with greatness. But to the common patron off the street you would never know it’s his place as he sat there among friends, pleasant, buying the occasional drink for a familiar face or a twisted story, blending in to his surroundings like water.
And it’s fitting that a boxer would own this bar, it’s a drinkers gym. The training grounds are simple: Cash only; No Happy Hour; $3-$6 cocktails (my Jamesons was $5.50); Blues and Jazz standards on the jukebox. All of this, mind you, deep in the heart of Times Square. And the patrons were mellow but engaged. Often times you’ll enter the neighborhood watering hole to a record scratch and a pack of snapped necks, but this isn’t the case at Jimmy’s Corner. Four decades of sales behind him and you get the idea that every dollar in the till is welcome so long as it adds to the atmosphere and the customers understand this. Bars like this are a favorite for their unspoken code, the rule where you don’t make anyone’s day shorter or longer, you just try and make make their day. The vibe is a good one.
I went against my tourist drinking rules and spent three-out-of-three days in Jimmy’s Corner, and I have no regrets about doing so. Jimmy Glenn is as generous with his stories as he is with his pours, and I suggest you experience both.
He turns 80-years old this year. Stop in and shake hands with history.
Photo by Jason Kuffer.
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