El Batey: The Rolling Stones’ Bar of Choice in San Juan

There’s no neon sign outside of El Batey. No neon signs inside either. And praise be, no TV. The windows have bars, not glass. The floor is uneven and rank. The place is open late til 3:00 or 6:00 or whenever. The bartenders will play Iggy Pop on the sound system on request. It’s a punky-junky dive bar located on a less-touristed street of Old San Juan.

I loved it. I could see myself going there night after night, quietly killing off brain cells with cheap rum as I sat at the bar reading and thinking deep thoughts.

It gave me a strange feeling, and the rest of that night I didn’t say much, but merely sat there and drank, trying to decide if I was getting older and wiser, or just plain old.
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

There’s a lot of legend attached to the place. The Rolling Stones drank there when they were on the island. Some claim it was Hunter S. Thomson’s watering hole when he lived in San Juan, the place he’d go to gather the experiences he would later thinly fictionalize in The Rum Diary. Maybe. In any event, it’s the kind of place where you COULD have seen him back in the day.

The word “louche” doesn’t even begin to describe it. Inside, the walls appeared to be sweating. (No, I hadn’t dropped acid.) Scribbled signatures covered the smudged wall space like a net of black words, an effect that felt strangely cozy, but also kind of insane. The floor looked sticky from spilled drinks. The fragrance, a musty eau-de-ashtray combined with damp, ancient stone. In the dim, amber light our fellow customers all looked a little unwashed. You immediately got the message: this was not a frozen cocktail with umbrella kind of place.
― Laura Albritton, Uncommon Caribbean

It’s not a place for the rule-bound or the asthmatic. Despite a citywide smoking ban in restaurants and bars, people puff away in El Batey as if it were 1966. And the bathrooms are not for the squeamish or the dainty.

A notice scrawled on the men’s room door reminds people that access is limited to “1 (one) @ a time!”

The bar pulls off the trick of being simultaneously homey and deeply alien. Palimpsests of graffiti cover every square inch of every wall and part of the the high ceilings. How drunk would you have to be to stand on someone’s shoulders or climb a rickety ladder to write on the fifteen foot high ceilings? The writing is so multilayered as to defy reading and much of it seems to be in the Drunkish language, contributing to the strangeness of the place. But knowing that 50 years worth of earlier patrons appreciated the place enough to leave their mark makes the place seem intimate and human.

There are only two actual signs in El Batey. One reminds you of where you are. And the other reminds you that the president is a wanker — as if you might forget either of those things.

Business cards and other ephemera make up the lamp shades that surround the dim lights above the bar. A couple of clamp lamps light the corners of the other rooms. It’s dark, the vibe is chill, and the promise is anything goes.

And over in the corner, an old jukebox awaits quarters, hoping that someone will play “Paint It Black.”

Old God sure was in a good mood when he made this place.
― Hunter S. Thompson, The Rum Diary

(Some of the photos in this post were taken by Josh Trumm)