Why Power House Bar matters.
Power House Bar is a storied dive bar where Hollywood's entertainment-district character meets a 1947 drinking-room lineage, surviving neon and a deliberately stripped-back revival built around inexpensive beer and classic cocktails.
Set along Highland Avenue near Hollywood Boulevard and just steps from the Hollywood First National Building, the bar occupies the western core of Hollywood between the boulevard's theater district and the foothills below the Hollywood Bowl, with Franklin Village extending east and the Santa Monica Mountains rising north beyond Franklin Avenue. The narrow interior preserves the low lighting, worn bar and close-set drinking-room scale associated with the property across decades of operation. Electric guitars and framed pieces cover portions of the walls, maintaining visual accumulation without turning the room into a themed recreation. A rear patio extends the compact interior outdoors, and the absence of large televisions, pool tables and a jukebox keeps conversation and drinking central to the room. The result is a Hollywood bar whose dark interior, surviving physical patina and restrained revival maintain the neighborhood drinking culture that persisted beside one of Los Angeles' most heavily trafficked entertainment intersections.
What defines Power House Bar.
Power House Bar is best known for tracing its Hollywood drinking-room history to 1947, when barber Joe Power opened a bar beside his barbershop near Hollywood and Highland. The operation survived for decades as an inexpensive local haunt amid the surrounding boulevard's repeated redevelopment, retaining its neon sign, dark interior, inexpensive draft beer and collection of framed wall pieces. By 2014, longtime manager Jim Kalin had spent a decade overseeing a room still selling draft Pabst Blue Ribbon for three dollars as ownership prepared a major renovation. The old incarnation closed that June and returned in November after Matt Winter reworked the interior and bartender Damian Windsor developed a substantially more elaborate drinks program. Winter incorporated wrought-iron bar shelving from Prague, seating upholstered with World War II tent fabric and soda-fountain stools dating to the 1920s, preserving the exterior neon as the clearest physical connection with the earlier bar. Windsor pushed the drinks toward turn-of-the-century European forms including shandies, shrubs, flips, sparkling drinks, sours and stirred cocktails, marking an unusually polished chapter in a property long associated with straightforward drinking. Power House later closed for more than two years before Cedd Moses and Pouring With Heart took control, placing Brian Lenzo and Curtis Woods over a revival that opened September 29, 2022. Their intervention deliberately returned the operation toward its neighborhood-bar roots, preserving the worn physical character and inexpensive beer program that had survived successive ownership eras.
The contemporary drinks program concentrates on recognizable cocktails and uncomplicated beer service, reversing the elaborate direction adopted during the 2014 renovation. Gimlets, Moscow mules, sazeracs, margaritas, Manhattans and whiskey sours anchor the selection, placing established preparations above proprietary complexity. The Dirty Dozen menu gathers those classics into a concise cocktail roster, with the Manhattan providing a whiskey-forward combination within a program deliberately oriented toward standards. Domestic cans, bottles and draft beer retain the inexpensive drinking culture historically associated with the room, and Pabst Blue Ribbon remains part of the daily happy-hour structure. Picklebacks and a mystery-shot wheel push the bar toward faster, less formal drinking, and darts on the rear patio supply a simple competitive element beyond the main room. The combination places Power House in a narrow category within contemporary Hollywood: a bar with capable classic cocktails that still organizes itself around inexpensive beer, uncomplicated pours and the social density of a neighborhood dive.
How Power House Bar fits.
Power House Bar works as the anchor for a Hollywood outing connecting the wooden production building tied to the emergence of the neighborhood's film industry, the movie palace that formalized the Hollywood premiere and the hotel where the Academy Awards first took institutional form.
Begin at Hollywood Heritage Museum, housed inside the surviving Lasky-DeMille Barn, a wooden structure built in 1901 and adapted for film production by Burns and Revier in 1912. Jesse L. Lasky, Cecil B. DeMille and Samuel Goldfish, later Samuel Goldwyn, incorporated the building into the Jesse L. Lasky Feature Play Company in 1913, and DeMille maintained an office there as the company developed the production operation that fed into Famous Players-Lasky and eventually Paramount Pictures. The barn received California State Historic Landmark designation in 1956, Hollywood Heritage assumed responsibility for its preservation during the 1980s and the building entered the National Register of Historic Places in 2014. Continue to Egyptian Theatre, completed in 1922 for Sid Grauman after a development syndicate purchased the site for $65,000 and commissioned Meyer & Holler to create an Egyptian Revival movie palace approached through a deep open forecourt. Grauman used the theater to stage the premiere of Robin Hood starring Douglas Fairbanks, helping codify the searchlights, red carpet and celebrity arrivals that became inseparable from Hollywood film premieres. Conclude at The Hollywood Roosevelt, the twelve-story Spanish Colonial Revival hotel financed by Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Louis B. Mayer and Sid Grauman and opened in 1927 after construction costing $2.5 million. Fisher, Lake & Traver designed its asymmetrical massing, wrought-iron balconies, arched openings and elaborate exterior ornament, giving the expanding entertainment district a major hotel directly across Hollywood Boulevard from Grauman's Chinese Theatre. On May 16, 1929, 270 attendees gathered in its Blossom Ballroom for the first Academy Awards, a private dinner ceremony lasting fifteen minutes that placed the hotel inside the institutional development of the American film industry. The progression moves from the wooden production building associated with Lasky and DeMille through Grauman's creation of the Hollywood premiere and culminates in the hotel where film-industry capital, architecture and the first Academy Awards converged as Hollywood became the ceremonial center of American motion pictures.
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