WORCESTER — The Dive Bar at 34 Green St. will close on Nov. 2, according to owners Alec Lopez and Sherri Sadowski. The couple explained that building owner Salvatore Molinari has plans to launch a family business on the site in conjunction with the completion of Polar Park in spring of 2021.





Lopez and Sadowski were recently given the option of signing a short-term lease, but declined based on a number of infrastructure issues that needed to be addressed.





“They haven’t done a repair in a long time; it’s obvious when you look at the building,” Lopez said, adding, “The Dive Bar’s two neighboring retail spaces have been empty for more than 14 years.”

















Under the direction of Lopez and Sadowski, The Dive Bar has had a global influence on the craft beer scene. Michael Bernfeld, general manager of the Craft Brewers Guild, is credited with coining the term “The Dive Bar effect,” referring to the bar’s powerful influence over market trends.





Leaving on their own terms was important to Lopez and Sadowski. “The passion for what we do isn’t in treading water. It’s about making progress,” Sadowski said, “And, it has been an amazing run.”





The Dive’s Many Lives





When Lopez began working at The Dive Bar in the mid-‘90s, a small group of nightclubs with powerful sound systems and a collection of pubs with jukeboxes dominated the college bar scene.





“The Dive took a neighborhood bar and fused it with a nightclub sound system,” Lopez recalled. “Every single night, we had three door guys and four bartenders.”





During that era, The Dive Bar was recognized by national publications such as Playboy, Maxim and Stuff Magazine for being one of the best dive bars in the country. Competitors soon caught on to their formula, investing in high-end sound equipment of their own.





Lopez secured an ownership stake from Paul Durkee and Jimmy Howarth and began to make some changes. Sadowski remembers sitting at a red light on Burncoat Street when Lopez got the call informing him that Guinness was out of stock.





“At the time, Irish Car Bombs were all the rage — college kids would go somewhere else if you couldn’t make them — and I told him, ‘I don’t know why you don’t just get Murphy’s Irish Stout. It’s a better beer anyways,’” she said.





That was when Lopez realized The Dive Bar could be anything they wanted it to be.





The beer nerds descended swiftly and Lopez began to think of himself as not just a bar owner, but a curator. He wanted to begin serving food. The couple attempted to buy the building from Molinari at 34 Green St. on a number of occasions, to no avail. This led to the inception of Lopez and Sadowski’s award-winning restaurant, Armsby Abbey, which opened at 144 Main St. in 2008.





At that point, The Dive Bar took on new life as a music venue. Local musician Duncan Arsenault treated the task of booking shows as seriously as Lopez treated the beer. The Dive Bar hosted big names such as Dub Apocalypse, Dopapod, Dana Colley of Morphine, and Shana Morrison (daughter of Van Morrison), among many others.





Somewhere around 2009, the music began to fade. With the addition of a thriving patio space out back, Sadowski observed a spike in sales on evenings without performances. The patio featured hop vines and an ever-evolving mural. By the summer of 2017, The Dive Bar finally got food, thanks to former Armsby Abbey employee Jonathan Demoga. Demoga’s food truck, MamaRoux, took up permanent residency on the patio, serving southern and Gulf Coast fare.





There are four distinct eras in Lopez’s mind: the college bar, the beer bar, the music venue, and the beer garden. The thought of The Dive Bar closing makes Lopez emotional, but he contends, “It would be irresponsible to stay.”



The Last Round





“The landlord is very emotionally attached to the building because it's been in his family for a long time,” Lopez said, adding, “The family has their own history there and I’m just a tenant, even though it has been 25 years.”





Lopez and Sadowski were told they could stay until the completion of the ballpark, but they felt the amount of electrical and plumbing costs necessary to maintain their insurance would be astronomical.





“There’s a son in the picture now and he wants to make his mark on that building,” Lopez explained. “My understanding is that he wants to create his own business, and maybe add a couple of other businesses as well.”





Lopez is doing his best to rationalize the circumstances. “If you look at it from our side, we had frustrations about not being able to invest any money because we never had a lease that was more than a couple years long — if we had one at all. It has been a battle. I mean, it's The Dive Bar and you want it to stay 'divey,' but you still want it to be safe and clean,” he said.





Sadowski and Lopez will commemorate The Dive Bar’s closing with special T-shirts designed by artist Heidi Geist, which will be available at a final farewell on Nov. 2.





If you want to understand The Dive Bar’s pervasive history one need only look to a YouTube video featuring Bill Coleman, Rick Rushton, Gary Rosen and Konnie Lukes engaging in a contentious mayoral debate during October of 2007. A woman from the crowd asks, “If you were mayor and there was a giant abandoned shopping mall in the middle of the city that someone was pretending to build into something useful, what would you do?”





At that moment, Lopez drops a glass behind the bar and the audience erupts in cheers. The camera pans to the crowd and rests for a split second on one spectator, Worcester’s current mayor, Joseph M. Petty. It is the perfect freeze-frame of Worcester’s past and future colliding in real time in the throes of new development.





“I have a million stories. And a million people have their own million stories,” said Lopez. “For me, honestly, in the last couple of days I've had the most joy realizing how much has been documented by so many people that loved their experience at The Dive so much that they felt compelled to immortalize it and share it with as many people as possible. What else could you ever want?”



