As I rub my bleary, rheumy eyes after another intoxicated year, I know my New Year’s resolution should be tempering consumption. Yet drinking responsibly would kill this column, leaving a void in drunken journalism. So I’ll make a manageable resolution: to kick starting the Scary Bar Project.

On every avenue and in every alleyway, there’s a dingy, mystifying alehouse filling you with both curiosity and fear. For countless reasons—scarred clientele, eardrum-exploding reggaeton, perhaps stomach-roiling odor—you’ve treated this saloon like a subway panhandler: fleeting eye contact, then life-or-death ignorance.

Yet one’s terrifying bar is another’s cherished watering hole. So what happens when you surmount qualms and preconceived notions and enter a supposedly “scary bar”? That’s what I angle to discover at the Starlite Lounge. For a half-decade, this corner relic—its atomic-era neon sign written in florid cursive script—has been an erratic puzzle. The Starlite would open at 5 p.m. and soon thirsty, shuffling gents would be buzzed inside to drown the evening. At night, music pulsed like a vengeful, disco-loving banshee.

Google told me Starlite, like the East Village’s Starlight, was a gay bar. This makes sense in downtown Manhattan, but in Caribbean Crown Heights? Was the Starlite a signpost of gentrification?

“No way,” a smiley bartender informs me one raucous Thursday evening. “We’re Brooklyn’s oldest black-owned, nondiscriminating bar.” He points to a banner boasting Starlite’s existence since circa 1960.

Little has changed. The front room is sausage-shaped, tight and narrow with a TV and plenty of bar seating. It opens into a black-box dance floor (a wall sign says hard-hat steel area) with seasonal snowflake decorations swaying from the ceiling. The space is worn-in and well-loved by the attitude-free, middle-aged bargoers.

“Hungry?” asks a lady carrying a deli tray filled with meats and crackers. I grab a turkey-Swiss combo. Karaoke Thursdays are often accompanied by nibbles to whet your singing appetite. A DJ dispenses soul and R&B standards, and the words are filled in with heartfelt, sincere vocals. No “Welcome to the Jungle” shenanigans here. I drink Bud bottles ($3) and stiff gin and tonics ($6) until I reach my fill of songs and salami.

Friday and Saturday nights reveal the pulsing music’s raison d’être. Lights dip lower, and old-school house music is cranked to booty-quaking levels. A nattily dressed coat check man shimmies to the beat, then collects outerwear from men dispelling the meat-market stereotype. They’re more concerned with shaking ass than grabbing it, making the dance floor welcome to dancers of every stripe.

“I don’t feel as out of place as I should,” says my evening’s companion, one of four women in attendance, including the hostess, who greeted us with smiles and dollar bills stuck in her ample cleavage. She even invited us to her New Year’s Eve shindig, which is more than most so-called friends have done.

This above-and-beyond attitude extends to the doorman. When I lament that a bodega won’t sell me a loosie cigarette (moderation, my friends, moderations), he produces a deliciously ill-advised Newport. I’m too stunned to thank him.

I puff away outside while the music and people careen around the, as always, friendly confines. One irrational phobia conquered. What’s next?

Suggestions for the Scary Bar Project? Shoot me a line at bars@nypress.com.

Starlite Lounge

1084 Bergen St.(at Nostrand Ave.), B’klyn

718-771-3340