Mac’s Club Deuce, iconic South Beach dive bar, celebrates 100 wild years

Back when the late chef Anthony Bourdain would drive around South Beach in a cherry red Corvette, he’d get a tattoo and walk down the street to grab a drink at “one of my favorite places on earth.” On one of those trips, he paid a visit to his buddy Mac Klein, the owner of the eponymous Mac’s Club Deuce. Klein had just turned 100 years old.

“You know what the amazing thing about being 100 is?” he told Bourdain about 10 years ago. “A year ago I was 99. Nobody paid attention to me. Didn’t care. I became 100. My God…”

Last year, Klein’s iconic dive bar was 99 years old, and nobody cared. Soon, it turns 100 and the whole city is celebrating. On Saturday, starting at 4 p.m., the bar is hosting an all-day block party with raffle prizes, merch, live music and plenty of drinks. Cash only, as always.

“It’s hard to fathom sometimes because I was born and raised on the beach, so I’ve seen it go through a bunch of different transitions,” said manager Christie Ashenoff. “I’m thankful that it’s still there. I’m proud that it’s still there.”

Mac’s Club Deuce stands alone in Miami’s infamous nightlife scene, not just for its age and historic significance but for its vibe. It is one of the few remaining local bars with a strong sense of community and a damn good happy hour. (BOGO drinks from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.!)

“You lose track of time in there. It’s like a portal,” said Suanay “Swan” Hernandez, founder of local food magazine Undrbelly and a bar regular.

It’s a devious little place with an angel number address: 222 14th Street. Every day from 8 a.m. to 5 a.m., the neon lights shine bright and the juke box bumps whatever you want. Silly spring breakers sloppily shoot pool with seasoned sharks who bring their own cue sticks. Bartenders chime in on juicy gossip sessions. Locals sip on affordable drinks just a few steps away from the ocean, which means a lot now that Miami is more expensive than New York City.

“You know what you’re getting when you walk in the door. I don’t care if you have $5 in your pocket or $5,000 in your pocket,” Ashenoff said. “We’re going to treat every person the same. I think people just like being seen and treated as humans and not as a potential payday.”

It’s revered as a pretension-free refuge from overpriced and overstimulating Ocean Drive. It’s a tourist destination that never became a tourist trap. This is no small feat in a city where working class locals are priced out mercilessly to make way for the ultra-wealthy here to work on their winter tans.

“Continuing to go to Mac’s is almost like a protest to what is going on in the rest of the city,” Hernandez said. “The locals and people who care about the city at its core yearn for spaces like that. We don’t just want the whole city to turn into Brickell.”

Mac’s Club Deuce is a living time capsule, home to some of the best stories in Miami-Dade County. Some things never change. The Deuce is one of them.

History in a ‘Mac-ademia’ Nutshell

While the bar brands itself as “Est. 1926,” nailing down the exact history of the building is a little tricky. According to owner Mary Klein, Mac’s widow, the building was originally built to store seaplane parts. It was a restaurant and bar pre-prohibition and a bar post-prohibition, Ashenoff was told.

Mac Klein was born in Brooklyn, New York in September 1914, six months before the City of Miami Beach was established. He joined the army and landed in Miami Beach for basic training, according to the bar’s website. He was sent to fight in World War II, where he was badly injured. A doctor said warm weather would help him heal, so he returned to Miami Beach in 1945.

Mac became a regular at Club Deuce and added his name to the business after he took it over in 1964. His bar rules were simple: no fighting, no betting, no loud cursing, no drugs. He worked at the bar up until his death in 2016 at 101.

Ashenoff has fond memories of Mac, also known as Macademia Nut. He was stern but sweet. Her mom met Mac in the ‘80s when she worked as a meter maid. South Beach was pretty rough, but she never had issues on 14th Street because Mac and Lou, the owner of Tattoos by Lou, kept an eye out for her.

In the late ‘80s, “Miami Vice” filmed at The Deuce and held its wrap party there, cementing the bar in pop culture history. The TV producers installed the now-iconic pink and green neon lights in the bar, on the condition that they let Mac’s keep them permanently.

Then came Bourdain, whose devotion to The Deuce held no bounds. The first time he came to Miami, Mac’s was the first place his friends brought him to, he said in an episode of “The Layover.” He featured the bar in three TV shows, promoting it to a new generation of tourists who appreciate Mac’s for the same reasons Bourdain did.

While there have been some minimal interior changes over the decades (there’s no longer a payphone or cigarette machine), the eclectic nature of Mac’s clientele has remained the same. On a Thursday afternoon in the summer of 1989, Miami Herald reporter David Zeman walked into the bar and met “a poet, an accountant, a cremation urn salesman, a carpenter, a nuclear physicist, a janitor, a yacht captain, and a bus driver.” Not to mention the newlywed couple smooching in the back. They met at Mac’s the week before and were married five days later.

The prices have also remained relatively low. Today, a beer is $7. In 1989, it was $2.

The bar’s cult following and “amazing” landlord explain how The Deuce survive everything from the Cocaine Cowboys era to the pandemic, all while keeping prices reasonable, Ashenoff said.

“We’re not a big corporation. We have one owner, and we’ve had the same bartenders for many years,” she said. “We are loyal to our employees and our locals and our regulars, and they’re loyal to us.”

Love, music and iguanas

Retired University of Miami professor Melissa Burley sat at the B-shaped bar on a recent Friday. It was 4 p.m., and Mac’s was busy with chain smokers, day drinkers and pool players. Dolly Parton played on the speakers as Burley flipped through her photos.

She worked at The Deuce as a bartender from 1995 to 2009, and took a series of photos she later published as a book: drag queens, birthday parties, backbends on the pool table, raunchy Halloween costumes, dudes climbing on construction equipment outside.

Burley paused at one of her favorite photos from the early 2000s: A blonde women swinging an iguana by its tail.

Two people at the bar had beef: a woman named Tara and a guy with a pet iguana, Burley recalled. “You owe me $25,” Tara said. “I don’t owe you s—,” the guy responded. She snatched the iguana off his shoulder, demanding her money back. He didn’t budge.

She swung the iguana round and round like a lasso. “Tara, put the iguana down!” a bartender yelled. She threw the poor lizard through the air, and it smacked against the cigarette machine. The whole bar gasped. The man grabbed his iguana (which survived the flight) and left. Tara flashed the bar and left, too, Burley said.

“I was the witness to all these amazing stories,” Burley said.

Across the bar, Aaron Ryder was losing a game of pool. A regular of 20 years, Ryder said he loves to come to Mac’s to play against great pool players. That afternoon, he found one.

Ryder’s favorite bar story was from this year’s FIFA World Cup when the bar was full of regulars and football fans from around the world. For three hours, he controlled the music, playing songs everyone inside sang along to. It was the most fun he and his friends had at the bar.

“We had this place rocking, everybody singing and dancing,” said Ryder, 50. “We turned The Deuce into a dance club and a karaoke bar at the same time.”

As author Lynn Wadell wrote in 2014, “The bar’s real treasure is the spell of friendship it casts.” That same Friday afternoon, Christie said hi to a few regulars who she knows by name. Some hugged her and promised to come to the block party.

Love also blossoms at The Deuce. Mary, now 85, bartended at there for many years before she and Mac started dating and eventually got married.

Similarly, Ashenoff also fell in love at the bar. She was working at Tattoos By Lou and came into Mac’s for a drink when she met her future husband Argelio “Angel” Diaz, who eventually became the bar’s manager. The couple got engaged at the bar and had two sons together.

Earlier this year, Diaz died at 60. The Mac’s Club Deuce community lifted Ashenoff up. A GoFundMe campaign for his funeral expenses and their sons’ education had a goal of $22,200. It raised over $43,000.

“They really changed how I was able to handle his passing. You hear people talk about ‘your community,’ but to see your community at work and to see how much people genuinely love and care for you, just seeing the good in people,” Ashenoff said. “Some people wouldn’t think that you would see that in a bar of all places, but the way they rallied around me, the boys, the staff, Mary, it’s really special.”

Coming together

Originally, Mac’s Club Deuce was going to celebrate its 100th birthday with something small inside the bar, Ashenoff said. But Troy Wright, the executive director of the Washington Avenue Business Improvement District, convinced her to do a block party, a big celebration for a big milestone.

From Washington Avenue to Collins Avenue, 14th Street will be closed to cars and open to the public. There will be special 100th anniversary merchandise, an outdoor bar and a stage for DJs and live music on the east side of 14th Street. The bar accumulated over 50 donations from dozens of local businesses for raffle prizes, which will go on throughout the day. Proceeds from the raffle will go to Heart Heroes, a nonprofit that supports children and families affected by congenital heart disease, and the Florida chapter of the Human Trafficking Foundation.

Former staff and bartenders will return to help out during the block party, including Burley. The bar’s centennial is a testament to Mac and Mary’s leadership as owners, she said.

“They’ve done everything they can to keep the essence of this place and the fun of this place,” Burley said. “People who get it get it, and people who don’t, they’ll come in, they’ll look around, they’ll be like, ‘Oh no!’ And they’ll run right out the door.”

Miami’s nightlife has always been weird, seedy and a bit of a facade. Some might say the city is in a crisis of cool, in desperate need of a wake-up call. Now more than ever, highfalutin clubs selling $30 cocktails pander to manosphere influencers, finance bros and the worst people you know from high school.

But not The Deuce, where dress codes be damned. Just wear shoes and be cool, man.

By the end of the night — or beginning of the day — everyone leaves the bar smelling like cigarettes. All are equal. All are welcome. At least until someone gets kicked out for fighting.