Most people’s Instagram feeds are aspirational catalogs: idealized people, beautiful pets, exotic views, healthy plants, and so many ads that promise ways to achieve all of the above. Brooke Janser’s account offers her followers something else: a full-body sensory experience of some of San Francisco’s diviest dive bar bathrooms.
“I started just collecting all these photos of heavily graffiti bathrooms, but also of whatever was aesthetically pleasing to me,” Janser, who has run @sfdivebarbathrooms for the last two years, told me over cider and tequila at Molotov’s on Haight St. “It just became like a hunt to find the funny things. Anything with character, really.”
Character she has found. A graffiti-scrawled dungeonlike latrine at Columbus Cafe. The tushy-touching trio urinal configuration at the Irish Bank. The “Pollock peeing” walls at Delirium. These photos practically have a scent (Rubbermaid commercial soap and stale beer). You can almost feel the moistness of the metal latch that you know won’t catch behind you.
More than 1,200 people who follow Janser want to see, feel, and smell those things, too.
Janser, who was raised in Ohio, came to the city in her early twenties in 2003 to pursue a career in photography and music video production. With both industries flailing, the self-proclaimed extrovert got a job as a bartender at Delaney’s (now called Campus) on Chestnut St. Two decades later, she is now one of the owners of the 90-year-old “non-Marina Marina bar” Horseshoe Tavern on Chestnut St. Janser also bartends at Mission Bar, where the bathroom’s palimpsest of graffiti serves a muse for her Instagram account.
For years, Janser told me, a can of red paint and a brush were kept handy to promptly cover any markings on the walls of the women’s restroom at Mission Bar. Up to twice a week, staff painted over isolated tags or silly things that “just looked tacky,” Janser said. That was, until someone was able to throw up some larger, more cohesive pieces on the wall that showed some intention and vision. The staff was impressed. Since then, the bathroom has accumulated layers of graffiti and stickers, a constantly updating record of a neighborhood booming, busting, and booming again.
“There’s a certain point where it looks good because there's enough. But you don't get there overnight,” said Janser. “If someone commits and it's a good foundation, then they leave the foundation and let people build.”
This “let people build” ethos is precisely how bars earn their dive badge. Clientele build a dive just as much as the bar’s owners. While there’s no definition for a dive, Janser says the place should feel like everyone’s second living room. Like a pair of perfectly broken-in jeans (or a perfectly broken toilet), this takes time. “It's got to cut its teeth a little bit before we call it a dive bar,” she says.
That’s perhaps why it’s so confusing to see places being described as “newly-opened” dives, like so many “pre-distressed” jeans you can buy at a mall. Something tells me the patrons of a so-called “elevated dive” serving craft cocktails with fluffy foam and skewered cherries on top would rather relieve themselves in their quiet luxury than in one of the bathrooms documented by Janser.
Many dive bar bathrooms are now recognized as site-specific works of artistic collaboration and standing archives of certain scenes, especially punk. When the toilet of East Village club CBGB flushed for the last time in 2006, New York City counterculturists lost their locker room. The Met eventually recreated it, stains and all, during its PUNK:Chaos to Couture exhibit in 2013. That same year, inspired by Ian McAllen’s still-standing Tumblr project “Toilets of New York,” filmmakers Brandon Bloch and Tim Sessler set out to document bathrooms across Williamsburg and Bushwick for DIVE ART.
In the Bay, the bathrooms of punk meccas like the recently reopened Mabuhay Gardens or 924 Gilman (technically not a bar, but still a dive) are less well documented, but for denizens, just as well loved.
In addition to honoring the goofy, the graffitied, and the gratuitous, @sfdivebarbathrooms memorializes works of art constantly on the brink of extinction. Walls get painted over, toilets replaced. Buildings are sold. Neighborhoods go upscale, washing away their dives in favor of matcha places.
In the case of one of her subjects, Thee Parkside, the fate of this San Francisco punk institution rests in the hands of a new landlord. Another dive, Geary institution Edinburgh Castle, was claimed by the bank in August, its once proudly stained urinals now listed on Vanguard Properties for $3 million. Punk dives especially are drowning, Janser said. When one goes under, decades of DIY is flushed away.
