Jimmy’s Corner: A Boxing Shrine Fights for Its Life in Times Square
Posted inHeadlines New York Boxing

Jimmy’s Corner: A Boxing Shrine Fights for Its Life in Times Square

At 140 West 44th Street in Manhattan, tucked between the neon chaos of Times Square and the theater district’s marquees, a narrow bar barely wide enough for two people to pass each other has outlasted nearly everything around it for more than half a century. Jimmy’s Corner — a dive bar monument to the sweet science — opened in 1971 and hasn’t changed much since. The drinks are still dirt cheap. The jukebox still leans heavy on R&B, funk, and soul. And every square inch of wall space is still blanketed with boxing photographs, fight posters, and memorabilia collected across a lifetime in the sport.

But now, for the first time in its existence, Jimmy’s Corner faces a fight it might not win — and this one isn’t in the ring.

The Legend of Jimmy Glenn

James Lee Glenn was born on August 18, 1930, in Monticello, South Carolina, the only child of Susie Glenn. When World War II disrupted their family, young Jimmy was sent back south to work his grandfather’s sharecropping farm while his uncle served overseas. He returned to New York City in 1944 and never left.

Glenn dropped out of Cooper Junior High School to support his mother — a decision rooted in the same principles of hard work, loyalty, and respect that would define his entire career. He found his way to boxing through the Police Athletic League, where he won a championship and decided he was ready for the real thing.

In 1949, Glenn began competing in the Golden Gloves as a welterweight and middleweight, compiling a record of 14 wins and 3 losses over two years. One of those losses came against a young fighter who would go on to become one of the most important heavyweights in history: Floyd Patterson.

Patterson, of course, would become the youngest heavyweight champion ever at age 21 in 1956 and the first man to regain the title after losing it. But when he and Glenn fought as amateurs, Patterson was still just a kid from Brooklyn with fast hands and a peek-a-boo stance. According to the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame, Glenn’s loss to the future champion was one of only three in his amateur career. Glenn later recalled the fight with characteristic humility and humor, telling a boxing blog in 2005 that Patterson beat him, knocked him down a few times, and broke his tooth — but he went the distance.

Rather than chase a fighting career, Glenn pivoted. He transitioned from amateur boxer to trainer, manager, cutman, promoter, mentor, and — as the World Boxing Council put it upon his passing — “a true gentleman of boxing.”

From the Corner to Jimmy’s Corner

Glenn’s training career brought him into the orbit of some of the biggest names in the sport. He worked as a cornerman for Patterson himself, along with Bobby Cassidy, Ralph Correa, Howard Davis Jr., Terrance Alli, Jameel McCline, and Mark McPherson. His gym, the Times Square Boxing Club, opened in the late 1970s on West 42nd Street and quickly became a haven for fighters from across the city. Muhammad Ali trained there when he was in Manhattan. Mike Tyson, Sugar Ray Leonard, Julio Cesar Chavez, and Roberto Duran all came through the doors at one point or another.

Adam Glenn, Jimmy’s youngest son and the bar’s current owner, told NY1 in 2020 that the gym served a deeper purpose for his father: it was a tool to help kids get off the streets. The Times Square Boxing Club was a no-frills operation — heavy bags sagging from their fittings, speed bags held together with tape, cracked mirrors, leaky showers — but nobody complained. The big man with the soft voice taught fighters the sport and, more importantly, taught them how to be men.

The gym closed in 1993, a casualty of Times Square’s redevelopment and rising rents. But by then, Jimmy’s Corner had been serving $3 beers on 44th Street for more than two decades.

Glenn opened the bar in 1971, well before the sanitized, tourist-friendly version of Times Square existed. The neighborhood was rough. Glenn posted signs reading “No Unescorted Women” to keep away women of the evening and “No Hats Allowed” to discourage their managers. He ran the bar with his wife Swannie, who he’d met when she was bartending there, until her death in 2015.

The bar also has a Hollywood connection. Robert De Niro filmed the final scene of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull at Jimmy’s Corner, and the bar appeared in the 1980 classic — a fitting tribute to a place that has always lived at the intersection of boxing and New York City culture. Sammy Davis Jr., Frank Sinatra, Michael Jordan, and Dick Cavett were among the famous names who passed through.

Boxing journalist Thomas Hauser — an International Boxing Hall of Fame inductee himself and the author of the definitive Muhammad Ali biography — profiled Glenn in a piece published on SecondsOut. In it, Hauser captured Glenn’s matter-of-fact approach to the business of boxing and the economics of running a bar in midtown Manhattan. Glenn told Hauser it was just a bar — simpler than dealing with food and cooks — but that he would have preferred running a gym if the rent hadn’t made it impossible.

Glenn was inducted into the New Jersey Boxing Hall of Fame in 2002 and was part of the inaugural class of the New York State Boxing Hall of Fame in 2012.

COVID Takes the Patriarch

In May 2020, the coronavirus came for Jimmy Glenn. He was 89 years old and had still been going to work five days a week. Adam Glenn, the youngest of Jimmy’s seven children — a Harvard Law graduate who had left his corporate attorney career to help run the bar after his mother’s death — contracted the virus around the same time as his father. Adam recovered. Jimmy didn’t.

Adam told CNN that in his father’s final hours, they were able to speak one last time. The outpouring from the boxing community was immediate and global. The World Boxing Council’s president Mauricio Sulaiman declared that a legend of boxing had heard his final bell. Promoter Lou DiBella, who had been close to Glenn for three decades, told BoxingScene that Glenn was as good a man as he had ever known — that other than his own father, he had never known anybody like Jimmy. Trainer Teddy Atlas summed it up simply: today Old Man Time took Old Man Boxing.

Michael Buffer, the legendary ring announcer, pointed fans to Hauser’s profile of Glenn, urging those unfamiliar with the man to read it.

Jimmy’s Corner went dark for the first time in its history.

Adam Glenn Reopens — and Fights Back

In October 2021, Adam Glenn reopened the bar. Little had changed inside — the memorabilia untouched, the jukebox intact, the prices barely moved. The cash-only policy was gone, replaced by a $10 minimum for credit card transactions. But the spirit of the place endured.

Bartender Mike Doherty, who had worked at Jimmy’s for years, told Gothamist at the reopening that it was joyous but also deeply sad — the first time the bar had been open without Jimmy being a presence in nearly 50 years.

Adam told the Washington Post that he had grown up in that bar, working there since he was old enough to push or carry anything. For him, it was as much home as his parents’ house ever was.

But even as Adam carried on his father’s legacy, a new fight was brewing — one with the Durst Organization, the massive New York real estate family that owns the building housing Jimmy’s Corner.

The Eviction Fight

The relationship between the Glenn and Durst families goes back decades. According to Adam, his father once intervened when he saw Seymour Durst, the patriarch of the real estate dynasty, being robbed on the streets of Times Square. Jimmy stepped in, stopped it, and a friendship was born. The Durst Organization could not confirm that specific story, but they acknowledged the bond between the two families. For decades, the rent stayed favorable and the relationship worked.

Then, according to court filings reported by Inc. Magazine, a lease amendment was signed when Jimmy was in his 80s — one that included a provision allowing the landlord to terminate the lease upon the death of James Glenn. Adam’s lawsuit, filed in New York State Supreme Court in December 2025, alleges that his father — who had no formal education beyond seventh grade — never understood the legal implications of what he was signing and was not represented by counsel.

Adam told CBS New York that he believes the Dursts took advantage of his father’s trust and friendship to insert the clause. He called it disrespectful to his father’s legacy.

The Durst Organization maintains that they went above and beyond their obligations, providing advance notice, offering $250,000 in buyout money, and allowing the bar to remain open longer than required.

In an NPR report that aired on February 9, 2026 — just days ago — Adam Glenn made clear that he is under no illusion that a three-story building steps from Times Square can endure forever. His lawsuit, he acknowledged, is less a frontal assault than a fighting retreat. He told NPR that he has people who work at the bar, family, and customers who love the place. He said he wants the time more than the money — and he wants to make sure his workers all have a soft landing.

A judge has temporarily halted eviction proceedings while the lawsuit plays out.

More Than a Bar

What makes Jimmy’s Corner worth fighting for goes beyond cheap drinks and a great jukebox. It’s a living archive of New York City boxing history — a place where the walls tell stories that no website or museum could replicate.

The photographs laminated into the bar tops and covering every surface trace a lineage from the golden age of midtown boxing through the gritty era of Times Square’s underworld years to the present day. A framed shot of Muhammad Ali resting his fist on Jimmy Glenn’s jaw. A Madison Square Garden ringside bell. Fight posters for bouts long forgotten by everyone except the men who bled in them. Pictures of regulars who became family.

New York City designated August 18 as “Jimmy Glenn Day” in 2022, a recognition of the man’s impact that extends far beyond a single business. As Adam told Inc., it reflected his father’s reach beyond a Black-owned family operation into something that belonged to the whole city.

Whether Jimmy’s Corner survives in its current location or not, the story of James Lee Glenn — the sharecropper’s grandson who boxed Floyd Patterson, trained with Muhammad Ali, ran a gym that saved kids’ lives, and built a bar that became a New York institution — is one of the great boxing stories ever told.

And his son is still fighting.

Sources: