Barney's Beanery — West Hollywood

Barney's Beanery at 8447 Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood has been a neighbourhood institution since John "Barney" Anthony opened it in 1920 — a rambling, pool-table-and-neon roadhouse that has served as the local bar for successive generations of artists, musicians, actors, and drifters passing through or getting stuck in West Hollywood. Jim Morrison was a regular in his final Los Angeles years, reportedly urinating on the bar on at least one occasion and being thrown out — and then returning because there was nowhere else quite like it. A plaque marks his stool. As Eve Babitz wrote in her novel: "In Barney's there was so much of him in the air."

Janis Joplin, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and countless others drank at Barney's across its century-long history. It was the kind of place that absorbed everything without being impressed by any of it — a democratic dive that treated rock gods and plasterers with equal equanimity. For Morrison, who was spending his last Los Angeles months traversing an increasingly small triangle of West Hollywood on foot, Barney's was one of the three or four places his daily orbit reached. The workshop, the Alta Cienega motel, and Barney's were the boundaries of his world by 1970.

Barney's Beanery continues to operate at the same address, much expanded from its original footprint but still recognisable in character. The pool tables, the neon signs, the long bar, and the general atmosphere of cheerful dissolution are intact. The FAGOTS STAY OUT sign that hung for decades — a relic of a different era — was finally removed in 1984. Morrison's plaque remains. The bar's proximity to the Doors workshop, the Alta Cienega motel, and the Strip makes it an essential stop on any Doors geography tour of West Hollywood.