Downtown Los Angeles has an unusual relationship with evenings. For most of the week it is a place people leave at six, which means that at half past six on a Tuesday you can walk into almost anywhere on Grand Avenue and sit down. Then something happens at one of the arenas or the concert halls and the same three blocks become impassable. Working out which kind of night you are walking into is the entire skill of drinking downtown, and the postseason complicates it further, because a first pitch at five o'clock Pacific lands exactly in the gap between the office emptying and the evening starting.
Downtown empties at six and refills for events, which makes it either the easiest or the hardest place in Los Angeles to find a table. Tell Karpo which night you are out and get the rooms around Grand Avenue that will actually be open and have space.
A building older than the pub inside it
The structure at 613 South Grand Avenue went up in 1919. The pub was installed in 1969 and built deliberately to resemble a turn-of-the-twentieth-century Irish public house — mahogany bar, hand-pressed tin ceilings, the whole vocabulary. It is recognised by the Los Angeles Conservancy as a historic place, which in a downtown that has demolished most of its own past is a meaningful designation rather than a decorative one.
Fifty-odd years is long enough for the imitation to stop being an imitation. A room built in 1969 to look like 1905 has now been itself for longer than most bars manage in total, and the accumulated wear does what no design brief can. It has also had a second life on screen — the pub has appeared in films and television, including the X-Files and Mr. Deeds — which tells you something about how convincingly the room reads.
Why the postseason suits it
Playoff baseball on the West Coast is often a five or six o'clock start, which is the worst possible time for most bars and the best possible time for a downtown pub. The after-work crowd arrives at the same moment as the first pitch, the room fills with people who did not plan this and are staying anyway, and the atmosphere builds naturally rather than being organised. By the eighth inning the office contingent has thinned and what is left is the people who actually came for the game.
A traditional pub is also structurally better suited to a long baseball evening than a modern sports bar. Booths and a long bar rather than high-tops and standing room, a room built for sitting for three hours, and enough separation that a conversation during a pitching change is possible. Baseball is a talking sport with a game attached, and the architecture matters more than the screen count. A room with six televisions and somewhere comfortable to sit will hold you for nine innings; a room with thirty screens and nowhere to put your elbows will not.
Working out the downtown night
The one piece of planning worth doing is checking whether anything is on at the arena or the concert halls a few blocks away. On a night with a major event the surrounding blocks are full from two hours beforehand and the pub will be as well; on a night without one, downtown at seven in the evening is one of the calmest places in Los Angeles to be. The same check tells you whether driving is sensible. Parking rates in this part of the city swing wildly depending on what is happening, and the difference between a flat evening rate and event pricing is substantial.
The alternative is straightforward: this stretch of Grand sits between two Metro stations, Pershing Square on the B and D lines to the east and the 7th Street hub a few blocks south, which connects to most of the county. For an evening ending at eleven after a long game, that is the correct way in and out, and it removes the parking question entirely.
- Check the arena and concert hall schedules before choosing a night — they set the whole area's mood
- A 5pm Pacific first pitch lands with the after-work crowd, which is the best time to arrive
- Booths and a long bar rather than standing room — built for a three-hour game
- Pershing Square and 7th Street Metro stations are both a short walk
Between here and the stadium
Dodger Stadium is a short distance north of downtown and the two are connected by a dedicated shuttle on game days, which makes a downtown pub a genuinely practical pre-game base rather than just a nearby one. Eat and drink on Grand, take the shuttle up, and avoid the stadium car park entirely. For a road game it works the other way: downtown is where you go precisely because the stadium is dark and there is no reason to be anywhere near Chavez Ravine. That flexibility is the strongest practical argument for keeping a downtown room on your list through a long series: it is the only part of the city that works equally well whether the team is at home or three time zones away, because its own schedule has nothing to do with baseball.
Practical notes
Casey's Irish Pub, 613 South Grand Avenue, Downtown Los Angeles. The building dates from 1919 and the pub has occupied it since 1969, built to resemble a turn-of-the-century Irish public house with a mahogany bar and hand-pressed tin ceilings; it is listed by the Los Angeles Conservancy as a historic place and has appeared on screen in the X-Files and Mr. Deeds. Traditional pub food and drink. Pershing Square and 7th Street Metro stations are both a short walk, and a game-day shuttle connects downtown to Dodger Stadium. Check arena and concert hall schedules before you come — they determine both the crowd and the parking price.
Tags: #LosAngeles #DowntownLA #GrandAvenue #MLBPlayoffs #IrishPub #HistoricLA #DTLA #WatchParty #Postseason #LABars #AfterWork #OctoberBaseball #ThingsToDoLA #LAConservancy
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Ask Karpo first
Want to know which downtown Los Angeles bars are open on a given evening, which are close to a Metro line, and where to eat before a late first pitch? Ask Karpo for the rooms around Grand Avenue and Pershing Square and how to time an evening around the game.
