Route 1 is lined with vital restaurants and businesses, but more importantly is home to the beloved bars that define College Park’s nights — for better or for worse.
Pass Marathon Deli, where speakers blast songs you haven’t heard since middle school. Walk by the ATM, where a long line of students scramble for last-minute cover. Weave through clusters of girls in their weekend uniform — black skirts, black tops, black boots. This is how you know you’re home — and that there’s a good chance your night’s antics will end up on Maryland Chicks by the morning.
Yet the routine has a shared motive: meeting people. Dating in college is hard, especially at a school with more than 40,000 students constantly moving in different directions. But there’s a fallback for when Route 1 nights don’t go as planned — Tinder and Hinge.
These quirks — some hilarious, most downright regrettable — are what make College Park nights worth remembering, even if you wake up begging to forget.
Terrapin’s Turf is the bar everyone has stumbled into at least once — and probably sworn off in the group chat the next morning. The packed center bar leaves no air to breathe as you wait for the bartender’s glance. In the chaos — whether you’re looking or not — slurring suitors emerge, using shared frustration as an excuse to flirt.
Maybe it’s the dim lighting, the slippery stairs or the way shadows conveniently hide everyone’s flaws. Or maybe it’s the Pitbull-obsessed DJ, playing cupid with an aux cord, determined to make sure Usher’s prophecy comes true: we’re all falling in love again. Whatever it is, the people you meet here usually vanish into an abyss of Snapchat adds and meaningless streaks by the next week.
A short walk away is Cornerstone Grill and Loft, the bar you graduate to once you outgrow Turf. The odds of meeting someone you’ll actually date are slim, but the likelihood changes depending on what floor you choose. Stay upstairs, and you might find someone to buy you a drink or dance with you, but you’re also at risk of attracting someone who likes you way more than you like them. Stay long enough and you may even run into the Instagram-famous lurking old man.
Stick to the lower level, and you’ll find the more relaxed crowd, where potential suitors are distracted by the game on TV — barely audible over a chorus of “Take Me Home, Country Roads.”
RJ Bentley’s — Route 1’s closest thing to a dive — blends in like a red shack, decked out with vintage license plates and automobile trinkets. It’s an upperclassman favorite, but not the place to find the love of your life.
Bentley’s is where you go when you’ve already settled down. No banter, no mid-drink number exchanges — just couples splitting ciders and beers, and friend groups that gave up pretending they’d go anywhere else. It’s the quiet comfort of a three-year relationship that somehow survived College Park.
Looney’s Pub — the furthest bar from the heart of campus — contains a chaotic mix of students and locals. If the line snakes out the door and down the stairs, forget about meeting someone you’ll text back in the morning. Shoulder-to-shoulder Saturdays mean the only lasting relationship you’ll make is with the DJ, who remixes every song like his life depends on it — and it always works.
Between the deafening music, the performative drunkenness and the overwhelming number of bars with interchangeable vibes, the idea of meeting your soulmate on a night out seems less and less likely. The best you can hope for is the tiny, ridiculous thrill of spotting a Tinder match in real life, and then lingering by the bar thinking of your next move until they start talking to someone else.
Bars aren’t the romantic settings movies make them out to be. They’re not where you find the love of your life. If anything, they’re where you awkwardly run into your ex — or worse, their ex.
Of course, there are exceptions — the lucky few who stumble into something real and have a meet-cute story worth telling their kids. But for most, a swipe right holds more promise than a night out, and the most play you’ll get is a bouncer grabbing your hand to stamp you in.
At least you’ll have that — a stamp that stains for days and the next morning’s hangxiety — to remember a night of thrills that only Route 1 can promise.
