The ritual of bar hopping in Columbus, Ohio’s Old North neighborhood, a common weekend excursion for the nearby college-aged locals, wouldn’t be complete without a stop at Dirty Dungarees. The laundromat-bar hybrid serves as both a relic of central Ohio’s lost laundromat pub trade and the unlikely nucleus of the city’s hardcore music scene.
Once part of a chain scattered across the central Ohio region, the North High Street location is now the sole survivor. Here, locals spin their delicates while pounding PBRs and watching sweaty band members scream at moshing teenagers.
It is a DIY melting pot of the city’s misfits and avant-garde.
One recent Friday, I walked past the washers, dryers, and modest bar during a death metal set as a long-haired teen grabbed the mic. “This song is about when your dick looks weird,” he announced. As the double bass kicked in, the young crowd, cramped on the tile floor, formed a small circle pit as bystanders held out their arms to avoid being punched.
Dirty Dungarees was never designed to be a hardcore venue. Opening in 1978, it was not until Drew Sherrick bought the business in 2015 that he started hosting shows there for his friends’ bands.
“I don’t want to be a venue, but it’s like a fun little extra thing to do because I’m friends with a lot of bands,” Sherrick told Columbus Monthly in 2017. Nonetheless, bands kept booking gigs there while other venues closed across the city. With its low, often optional, ticket prices, grungy aesthetic, and proximity to Ohio State University, Dirty Dungarees has cemented itself as the go-to venue for DIY shows.
“I feel like Dirty Dungarees is the heart of [the hardcore scene],” said Caroline Smyth, an occasional attendee at the venue, although she observed that the crowds have changed in age. “Everybody there was like, 19,” Smythe, now 27, reflected on the last time she attended a DJ set there, “and so I left immediately.”
She pointed to viral TikToks that showcase the venue as a quirky spot for all ages. It’s one of the few venues in Columbus where it’s common to find all-age shows.
Even with its full schedule, Dirty Dungarees, like other cultural microcosms in the city, has faced existential threats. When the building was sold in 2023, locals feared it would be bulldozed to make way for luxury apartments, a fate shared by similar landmarks in central Ohio like Colin’s Coffee. Although it survived, controversy has followed: regulars took to Reddit to accuse the venue under new ownership of losing some of its more progressive charm.
Despite this, the space lives on as the center of the Columbus underground. Dirty Dungarees bartender of two years Sterling Demons (pronounced Deh-muns) told me: “You have your assholes, that exists in life, that happens, but for the most part, everybody’s been very loving since day one I’ve worked here.”
As the neighborhood faces an uncertain future with a quickly expanding college campus to the south and a pricey neighborhood to the north, venues like Dirty Dungarees have become even more vital in the struggle for the soul of the city. “We can all come together and have a good time,” said Demons. “That’s what it’s about.”