Sometime on the night of March 23, a 10-ton garbage truck collided with a wooden utility pole in an old alley on the edge of downtown Minneapolis. Unfortunately, the pole carried an electrical transformer that landed on the roof of a 102-year-old brick building, promptly setting a blaze that burned through the interior of the building.
This happenstance gutted one of the most significant spots in Minneapolis: the city’s oldest gay bar. A drab windowless building full of life, the 19 Bar sat on 15th Avenue for over 70 years as a pillar of the city’s LGBTQ community. Thanks to an accidental moment, it’s not entirely clear if the 19 Bar will survive. I hope it does; otherwise, it’s a tragicomic way for a Minneapolis cultural institution to disappear.
Precious, vulnerable spots
There are many ways that old bars vanish: gentrification, neglect, and obsolescence chief among them. Regulars might slowly age away. Neighborhood jobs might be outsourced. Maybe the land becomes too valuable, and the owners get an offer they can’t refuse. Times change, and eventually cities do, too.
This is true for all old businesses, but bars have a particularly rough go of it. They’re often already targeted by neighborhood groups, police captains, or prudish city regulations. For example, in the book “Land of 10,000 Loves,” Stewart Van Cleve, a historian of queer Minnesota, describes how the 19 Bar barely survived the attention of the local “Loring Nicollet Community Council,” which tried to demolish the location in 1980 for (yet another) urban mall. Despite efforts of local council people like Barbara Carlson, the bar survived.
All this is why the 19 Bar’s accidental fire is tragic: It gutted a place that was still thriving and one of the best remnants of a fast-changing neighborhood. The Loring Park area, especially the stretch on Nicollet Avenue between Franklin and the Convention Center, has been booming. Longstanding businesses like the New Jerusalem restaurant and Market BBQ restaurants have been displaced for large apartment buildings, and what should be a key link between downtown and south Minneapolis is finally seeing a renaissance.
It’s quite a turnaround for the Loring Park neighborhood, once viewed as mostly worthless. The infamous 1930s “redlining maps” described the area as one that “has seen its best days.” The homes across the street were redlined, as was much of the neighborhood on the downtown’s southern edge. This is probably why large parts of the Loring Park neighborhood were targeted by urban renewal, to be “improved” by projects like the Loring Greenway developments or the massive Hyatt conference hotel. Meanwhile, the freeway carved a huge trench through the heart of the community just a few blocks away.
The history of the 19 Bar
The building that now hosts the 19 Bar played a tiny part in this story. It began as a laundry service a century ago. When the building was built in 1922, it ran service for nearby hotels like the Donald and the Buckingham, along with washing clothes for the neighborhood yuppies. After the end of prohibition, like many retail establishments, the building converted into a bar, and it’s remained so ever since.
In his book, Van Cleve goes on to describe how the the bar transitioned into a rare haven for the gay community in the mid 1950s when it was bought by “an unmarried resident of the nearby Park Terrace Apartments”:
“When it ‘went gay’ after [Evrett] Stolz bought it in 1956, the 19 established itself as a new epicenter of a gay ‘ghetto’ show residents had migrated from the demolished Gateway District in search of community.”
Van Cleve quotes a community elder, describing the pre-Stonewall era: “You always saw a lot of married men who would come to the bar for … sex. And that was the only reason they’d come.”
That was then. These days, the annual Pride festival has dozens of corporate sponsors, and there are a half dozen LGBTQ bars and clubs in the area. To me anyway, the 19 Bar remained a neighborhood place. It was hard to find, for those who didn’t know, a windowless building easy to overlook. Entering the bar, no matter what time of day, the vibe would be almost timeless: old regulars alongside young people playing pool or shooting the breeze. It struck just the right mix of welcoming and traditional.
Bars and rebirth after fire
In 2010, a fire broke out at the Nook, a legendary St. Paul burger joint kitty corner from the Cretin-Derham Hall campus. It was the kind of place steeped in tradition, bringing old customers from across the state for their spin on the juicy lucy. The interior walls, long festooned with photos, news, clippings and CDH sports memorabilia, all destroyed.
That same year, a next-door arson fire damaged Mama’s Pizza, a longtime staple pizza joint on St. Paul’s working class Rice Street, a place that had been almost single handedly keeping Italian American traditions alive in the old neighborhood, the kind of place where the guy flapped pie crusts in the window and gave out tiny ice cream cones to kids and elders alike at the end of their meal.
Neither place was ever quite the same. After a few years of treading water post-COVID Mama’s Pizza closed to dine-in seating and has resigned itself to infrequent hours on Rice Street. The Nook bounced back and still has lines out the door, but old timers know the vibe has changed.
If the 19 Bar has the same fate, it’ll be lucky. In his book, Stewart Van Cleve also describes a story of an arson at the 19 Bar in the late 1980s. It triggered a community effort to save the place, and “the bar was back in business within a week.” This time, according to bar owners, it might take a bit longer. But after a few fundraisers — their GoFundMe is still active — it seems like the bar and its neon signs might survive.
Bill Lindeke is a lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Geography, Environment and Society. He is the author of multiple books on Twin Cities culture and history, most recently St. Paul: an Urban Biography. Follow Bill on Twitter: @BillLindeke.
