Our tribute to the holiday services provided by Seattle’s Best Dive Bars continues with the 5 Point Cafe (415 Cedar St.). Celebrating 80 years in business today, this cafe is under new ownership and has undergone a bit of a face lift. Don’t expect major changes, facial is a better description, the bar’s nooks and crannies vacuumed and cleaned for something closer to a new dive bar smell. In honor of its celebrating today, we’d like to share a bit of history the new owners shared about this storied place.C. Preston Smith and his wife opened the 5 Point Cafe in 1929 and began serving beer in 1933, after Roosevelt signed a bill approving 3.2% beer. His son Dick Smith took over the 1970s. This makes the 5 Point the oldest family run eatery in the city. Dick Smith gained notoriety for the place for several big stunts. He was the one who installed the periscope in the men’s room that peers at the Space Needle. He built a park–with his own money–on a vacant lot not far from the bar for the kids in the Denny Regrade neighborhood that he felt were overlooked by the city. (Rent the wonderful Cinderella Liberty with James Caan for a good look at just how much of a dump Seattle was in the 1970s.) On the flip side, Smith also pissed off neighbors for hiring scantily clad pretty young things in roller skates to plug parking meters in the area, leaving notes that owners had escaped a parking ticket courtesy of the 5 Point Cafe. Smith was also the one who first rolled back prices to those of the Depression Era in 1979, for the establishment’s 50th anniversary. That stunt got him on television, and a mention from Walter Cronkite himself.