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Stepping into this cluttered coffee shop is a bit like falling down Alice's rabbit hole. Bookshelves packed with out-of-print bestsellers stretch to the high, pressed-tin ceiling from which a 130-year-old Brooklyn Dodgers bicycle hangs, obsessively collected thrift-store lamps leer weirdly from the walls, and meticulously arranged figurines and political artifacts create an alternate universe. Here, a surprisingly drinkable house wine costs $4 per plastic cup (beers such as Ballantine, one of America’s oldest brands of pale ale, are even cheaper) and the nightly live music is almost always free. Exceptions are when big promoters line up white-hot touring acts that pack the place so tight it overflows to the back garden—essentially an open-air sculpture studio littered with the half-welded remnants of the owner Steve Trimboli's last endeavor, Greenwich Village’s Scrap Bar. On regular nights, inward-looking avant gardists blast waves of feedback to the recent college grads lounging on the decaying furniture while neighborhood kids wander in for free wi-fi or to challenge their elders at chess. — Keach Hagey

Owner Steve T. once hit the motherlode of literary kitsch when he volunteered to clean out a house packed with’50s and ’60s smut books. In typical entrepreneurial spirit, he scanned the covers, silk-screened them on T-shirts and sells them behind the bar and on his website under the name dirtybookart.com.