Bloomington

Bloomington's downtown bar scene has some genuinely old roots - Western Tap has been around since 1892, Lucca Grill was opened in 1936 by Italian immigrant brothers and still carries their hometown's name, and Rosie's Pub famously occupies Abraham Lincoln's former law office. BarFinder lists 69 venues in the city, led by classic bars and sports bars with a solid run of pubs and a growing brewery scene behind them, including Keg Grove Brewing Company. The downtown scene also has a strong live-music and bar-crawl tradition, from the Red Lion Inn's run as the area's top live-music club in the 1970s to an annual Jazz and Blues Pub Crawl that's drawn thousands of visitors downtown each year since the early 1990s. It's a bar scene with more genuine history packed in than its size might suggest.