Snap Up the Savings at Alligator Lounge

If you’re a young, marginally employed or not-at-all employed Brooklynite, it really is starting to feel like the new Great Depression. Lots of companies have “hiring freezes”, which won’t thaw out until this economy stops plunging and peaking like a rollercoaster. Job listing sites barely update, and everyone’s suddenly remembering how to live within their means. One area of spending that’s impossible to cut back on is rent, the biggest expense for most of us. Another one is food. And another one is drinking.

That’s where Alligator Lounge comes in. Maybe you’ve been there before, and taken advantage of their “one beer equals one pizza” deal. Probably you thought it was a great idea for happy hour, or for pre-gaming on your way out to a pricier bar or party. Maybe you didn’t think it was such a great idea, because unless you’re having a meal, you probably don’t want more than one pizza. Maybe you thought the pizza was sub par, or you were annoyed by all the college-y types and starving artists fighting for their place in the line before the oven.

But now that’s all beside the point. At the Alligator Lounge, a Yuengling costs $4. After picking up your plain pie, maybe you’re not completely full. So you get one more, and voila: dinner. At the most, you’re out $8, and you’ve had two beers and two pizzas. It’s not quite the Joad family picking grapes of wrath in the dustbowl, or F.D.R. era hobos standing in the breadline, but it does add up to some pretty clever Depression survival. And if you get the beers and pizzas at Happy Hour prices? You could stay alive long enough for a new WPA Writer’s Project to start up.

Alligator Lounge has its competitors for the headquarters of New Deal survival. On Bedford, the Charleston caters to the L train crowd one stop east (Alligator is near the Lorimer stop), with the same drink-for-a-pizza deal. While Alligator has a weird Tiki/sports-bar/gay-sports-bar feel, Charleston is often full of raucous drunks, and the pizza is greasy enough to make eating difficult. In Manhattan, Crocodile Lounge is essentially the same joint, but with a classier atmosphere. But who can afford Manhattan, when you’re one bindle away from packing up the jalopy and heading out across the debt-ridden, foreclosed-upon country, in search of migrant labor jobs and the ghost of the American dream?