Jimmy's Corner: America's greatest dive bar and a slice of old New York
Jimmy Glenn wore many hats during more than seven decades in and around the fight game. He had 16 bouts as an amateur, once going the distance in a loss to the future heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson. He worked as a cutman and managed a number of fighters and trained a few more.
But Glenn, who died last week of complications from the coronavirus aged 89, was perhaps best known for the iconic watering hole that bears his name on 44th Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, a half-block east from the neon marquees and flashing Jumbotrons of Times Square.
For years Glenn owned and operated the decidedly old school Times Square Gym two blocks down on 42nd, where he taught young fighters and worked the pads for his friend Muhammad
Ali when he was in town. The gym and the building that housed it are long gone, razed in the early 1990s amid a redevelopment that transformed the neighborhood from gallery of drug dealers, pickpockets and sex shops to the Disneyfied tourist hub of present day.
But Jimmy’s Corner has endured, one of the last vestiges of the area’s gritty, pre-Giuliani incarnation, hardly wider than a walk-in closet and not so different today than when it opened shop in 1971. Three-dollar beers are trafficked seven days a week from 11am till 4am, the jukebox is loaded with Stax classics and the walls are a dense assemblage of posters, memorabilia and photographs culled from the proprietor’s panoramic life in the hurt business.
A native of South Carolina, Glenn moved to New York during the 1940s and took up boxing at a Police Athletic League gym. He began training amateur boxers at the Third Moravian Church in East Harlem before working the corner for such fistic greats as Patterson, Michael Spinks, Aaron Davis, Bobby Cassidy, Howard Davis Jr and Terrence Alli. In his later years, Glenn steered the American heavyweight Jameel McLine to a pair of title shots.
Even as he approached 90 years old, Glenn was a nightly fixture at the bar, typically arriving around 10pm and holding court with the regularly packed crowd of midtown workers, curious tourists and union stagehands from the nearby theater district. It’s been decades since New York was supplanted by Las Vegas as boxing’s center of gravity, but when a card does come to town, it’s not uncommon to find promoters, trainers and ring types along the same long bar where Sammy Davis
Jr, Robert De Niro, Frank Sinatra and Michael Jordan once sat. A sign hanging behind the bar amid the glow of Christmas lights informs customers of the only rule: Let’s not discuss politics here. “I’m not going to be a billionaire,” Glenn once said. “It’s too late now. So I sell three-dollar beers.”
Jimmy’s Corner has been temporarily shuttered due to the pandemic, but Glenn’s youngest son, Adam, has promised to carry on its legacy. New York is far richer for it.