Mac’s Club Deuce is celebrating its 100th birthday this Labor Day weekend with a massive block party on South Beach.

The party takes place Saturday, September 5, from 4 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. outside the legendary bar at 222 14th Street. Expect music, drinks, friends, strangers, locals, tourists, and enough Miami Beach energy to power several questionable life decisions, like why did I come to the beach, exactly?

For the uninitiated, Mac’s Club Deuce is small, dark, cash-only, and wonderfully resistant to change. There is a curved snake-like bar, a pool table, jukebox, and a century of cigarette smoke absorbed into every surface. It is part of the pantheon of Miami dive bars, up there historically with the defunct Tobacco Road and Churchill’s Pub, along with Fox’s, Duffy’s and The Taurus in Coconut Grove,  which is also older than most of our parents’ bad habits.

The Deuce has been immortalized by the late Anthony Bourdain, appeared in Miami Vice, and attracted generations of filmmakers, artists, musicians, celebrities, locals, degenerates, and people simply searching for a dark place to drink at an unreasonable hour.

One hundred years of anything in Miami is worth celebrating. Buildings disappear and neighborhoods get rebranded, right? Beloved institutions become condos or restaurants serving $27 cocktails with rosemary sticking out of them. The Deuce remains, stuck in its wonderful ways.

Even if you do not consider it the best dive bar in Miami (cough, um, Mike’s at the Venetian), or even the best dive bar on Miami Beach (ahem, Ted’s Hideaway), it is unquestionably the best dive bar east of Washington Avenue between Fifth and 15th streets.

Relax. We are kidding.

We have nothing but love for the Deuce. It is a great bar, an institution, and this should be one hell of a party.

Mac’s Club Deuce Turns 100

The event is presented by the Washington Avenue Business Improvement District and promoted through Miami Beach’s tourism machinery, which admittedly waters down the whole “dive bar” element a little. Nothing says underground drinking establishment quite like an official business district activation. Still, who cares?

If you are in town, and the temperature is not one million degrees, head to South Beach and pay your respects to a genuine Miami institution.

It is also worth noting that Mac Klein, who purchased the bar in 1964 and added his name to Club Deuce, lived to be 101 years old. He continued working at the bar seven days a week and died in 2016.

File that little fact away in the folder marked: Do I Really Need to Quit Drinking and Smoking Cigarettes?

Because if that motherfucker lived to 101, none of this shit makes sense.

But in all seriousness, from the mainland on the other side of Biscayne Bay, we wish Mac’s Club Deuce nothing but love, prosperity, and another hundred years of holding down Miami Beach.

The Deuce stands like a wall of dive-bar resistance, keeping people from crossing the causeway and infiltrating our mainland spots like The Corner, Churchill’s, and Las Rosas.

We love you for that, even if we do not visit enough. But we have visited plenty over the years, and we will be back. Even if you still allow smoking inside. So what if you only take cash. Whatevs if the place is so small that ordering a drink sometimes feels like playing a game of Twister with strangers. Mac’s Club Deuce has more character than Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura. More character than an overwritten screenplay. More character than most of Miami Beach combined. And we love it for exactly that reason.

Happy 100th birthday, Club Deuce.