It had a reputation as one of the roughest bars in the city and was located across from the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

[4] The Terminal Bar was featured in the Martin Scorsese film Taxi Driver[5][6] and was the subject of an award-winning American documentary short film, Terminal Bar, directed by Stefan Nadelman[7] that used a combination of animation, live action and black-and-white photography of Terminal Bar's former patrons taken by the director's father, bartender Sheldon Nadelman, from 1972 to 1982.

[8] Scorsese paid tribute again in 1985, featuring a pub called "The Terminal Bar" in his film After Hours; The Emerald Pub in SoHo stood in for the defunct Terminal Bar.

[9] A collection of Sheldon Nadelman's Terminal Bar photos was released in book form in 2014 entitled, Terminal Bar: A Photographic Record of New York's Most Notorious Watering Hole.

[1] The area where the Terminal Bar formerly stood is now occupied by The New York Times Building.