It would be easy to call the Ottobar our 9:30 Club, our Stone Pony, even our CBGB—but none of those clubs have stayed as unapologetic and underdog as their original iteration, if they even still exist. After all these years, the Ottobar remains as decidedly dark and dingy as it ever was, smelling of cigarette smoke, body odor, and last night’s stale booze. Old fliers still cover the walls, sloppy graffiti stays scribbled across the bathroom stalls, and gruff doormen wait at the back door armed with hand stamps that linger like a hangover. And every night of the week, the small black stage still represents the Ottobar’s original M.O.—and the spirit of Baltimore: We’ll take you, any way you come.

“Think about all that’s changed in Baltimore over the last two decades, but the Ottobar’s still there.”

“You never really felt left out at the Ottobar, which is probably one of the reasons it’s been around for so long, because—20 years?” marvels Sam Sessa, former entertainment editor at The Sun and music coordinator at WTMD. “Think about all that’s changed in Baltimore over the last two decades, but the Ottobar’s still there.”

In September 1997, the venue opened its doors on 203 Davis Street in the old Chambers nightclub. At the time, there was no Rams Head Live or Baltimore Soundstage, no Metro Gallery or Sidebar. “There was kind of only one club at any given time,” says Lee Gardner, former music editor at City Paper. “The Ottobar came along and became the cool place to play. It was this professionally run rock club on one hand and this sort of weird, crazy space on the other.”

At the time, two of the town’s most popular venues were the larger, IMP-partnered Fletcher’s in Fells Point and the underground Memory Lane in Pigtown. “When Memory Lane closed, that left a giant hole for something like us to step in,” says Ottobar co-owner Michael Bowen, who was a musician himself as lead singer of the punk-pop goofballs Buttsteak. “Baltimore definitely needed a space that would be a little more adventurous, so when Davis Street opened, we became a natural place for shows without as much red tape.”

Located in the heart of downtown, the Ottobar became a go-to for the city’s rebellious rock scene. From the start, it was open seven nights a week, booking everything from local indie, punk, and rock bands to national touring artists for its 125-person room. “We rarely turned anyone away,” says the venue’s booker and promoter Todd Lesser. “We didn’t have any real limitations. We just were eager from the start. There weren’t many rooms in town for loud, artsy bands—and the musicians needed a place to play.”

But Davis Street wasn’t some audiophile’s Shangri-La. Instead, many refer to it as a “tiny little box,” with a teeny stage and an even teensier upstairs lounge that held little more than a cigarette machine and pool table. “I don’t want to say it was the Wild West,” says Craig Boarman, who started at the venue as a promoter before becoming partner in 2001, “but it was pretty wild.”