Another Downtown Dive Disappears as the Hat Trick Lounge Gets Iced

[Now empty in the empty city.]

The last few years have not been kind to downtown Saint Paul dive bars, and COVID-19 and the absence of sports has made everything worse. I was downtown last week and once again struck by the lack of people, which is saying something for a downtown that is typically lacking in signs of human life in the first place.  

Well, it seems inevitable that bars will go out of business during the COVID pandemic, and that goes double for places located downtown that are dealing with a huge drop in population. You would expect the most marginal places to be the first to disappear,  and there was no more marginal dive bar in downtown Saint Paul than the Hat Trick.

The Hat Trick -- formerly the Top Hat, but the named was changed when the Xcel Energy Center opened up -- was in a historic one-story building in the middle of one the city’s last old blocks in the downtown core. It shares a wall with the the decrepit Empire Building, smushed between the Pioneer-Endicott alley and a large parking ramp, in what was once the heart of old downtown. 5th and Robert should be one of Saint Paul’s prime locations, but today, with the skyway buildings sucking all the life off the street, somehow it always seemed desolate. Even finding the place was like walking into an alley you didn’t know existed.

Each time I went into the place, I was struck again by its slapdash character. It was the kind of dive that was made from patchwork, where you could see each and every repair, remodel, or new piece of furniture in the place. Walking through the Hat Trick was like visiting a museum, various things on the wall dating back sometimes decades. The curiosities on the wall were unparalleled; I was especially fond of the weird carpet shamrock. The bar itself was a split-level and U-shaped, and festooned with historic-looking 70s lampposts.

They had big darts tournaments and a good pool table elevated somehow onto a balcony overlooking the main bar room. Typically the TV was tuned to local news unless there was Minnesota sports happening somewhere. There was often a newspaper sitting on the plush bar railing, probably opened to the comics or the sports page. This was one fo the last places in downtown where you could be absolutely sure to find the marginal folks of Saint Paul, people passing the time and drinking the day away. At night, local cover bands would play in the big side room. There was a vending machine (!) and one of the city’s dingiest bathrooms down a long beige hallway.

[The Hat Trick today.]

The building is for sale and the interior gutted. Almost nobody will miss it, but downtown is surely less diverse without the Hat Trick Lounge, made all the poorer without this weird refuge. RIP Hat Trick Lounge!

[Some of the things on the wall.]

This Week is Your Last Chance to Soak in Big V's Exquisite Dive Atmosphere

[The eclectic interior of Big V's in the early winter afternoon.]

If the walls of Christensen's Big V's Bar on University Avenue could talk, I'm sure they'd say "Hey get this carpet off me!"

The weird brown carpeted walls of one of Saint Paul's oldest bars is just one of the many delightfully bizarre features you'll still find inside the long narrow and ancient bar, that is slated for remodeling, renaming, and renewal at the end of the month.

Big V's has a storied legacy in Saint Paul as a music venue,  but its history goes much father back than that into the 1880s. There's a secret abandoned bowling alley in the basement that I've never seen, but there's also plenty of strange stuff on full display up in the regular confines of the place that you can still witness for yourself, at least until Wednesday night.

The carpeted walls, the strange and antique faded teal, grey, and brown color palette, the smattering of hand-written signs ("Bartenders are responsible for any checks they cash!"), the mid-century light fixtures, and the delightfully real wall menu are all part of the fun at this wonderful place that is sure to be remodeled into a more boring but more vital future over the next few months.

They are having a big blowout show on Wednesday night, and I am told to expect early 2000's levels of fun. This is one of the only bar stages in town on which I personally have performed, and if you buy me a drink at Big V's in the next few days, I'll tell you all about it.

Get thee into the spacious vacuum of Big V's bar for your final round. For now, it's still cash only, as all great dives should be.

Here's my writeup of Christensen's Big V's from my in need of an update, Noteworthy Dive Bars of the Midway guide book:

Listening to Tom Waits sing Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis on the Big V’s juke box during the holidays is an exquisite treat, like an aperitif at a waterfront café in a Provençal village at sun- set. Only the opposite. 

For many years, Big V’s and the Turf Club just across chaotic Snelling Avenue performed a teeter-totter of Saint Paul rock and roll. Many nights of the week, you could go see a show at the Turf (“the best remnant of the 40s”) and, if one of the bands in the set didn’t suit your fancy, simply walk a block to Big V’s instead. Back then there was music most every night on the rickety back stage of this long rectangular room. Almost without fail the act would be less predictable, less arranged, and less polished than its corresponding cross-the-street act. I’ve seen nut sacks on that stage. 

These days, Big V’s seems almost a tombstone for its former selves, a hushed collection of Midway drinkers killing time. Le plus ça change. Yet in another way, like a contented grandparent, the bar has reached new heights of being down, the frantic ebullience of another era replaced with a weathered determination like the face of a farmer. You can read the history of the Midwest in its lines. 

The bar itself overflows with dive decor. The heart of the heart of the dive district, doors down Snelling Avenue and (naturally) next to a decrepit second-story sober house. The green ceiling hangs but- tressed by odd wooden beams. On the wall opposite the bar, close to the crown, and old sign from the pre-Christensen days whose dingy letters spell out a menu of depression-era price points: limburger cheese sandwich, fifteen cents. The walls are literally carpeted, a palimpsest of odd fads. One corner is covered in rock posters from the early 2000s. The brown carpet is presumably a 70s relic, useful for when the young were bouncing off of them. And there is indeed a “Big V” behind the bar. 

Above the bar just to the right of the Miller sign hangs a sketched black-and-white portrait of a man in a beret, simply framed. It’s a drawing of a late regular who, so it is said, maintained the peace at Big V’s during the darkest days of the 80s and 90s. I am told he (and his name I cannot recall) carried with him a revolver while he drank and hung out, and through carefully aimed intimidation and friend- ship managed to avert many of Big V’s biggest emergencies. Those were different times, I am told, but his shrine lives on. Imagine that each weathered picture or hanging knickknack could tell such stories. In fact, they probably can. 

If you go to Big V’s on a Tuesday evening, you have a 50/50 shot at hearing the jam session, typically a few guys with guitars working through changes of Great American rock. These days the Green Line whirrs by every few minutes, and this side of the street, a row of run-down dusty two-story buildings opposite the dusty strip malls and drive-thru fast food across University. 

A few years ago, the building next to Big V’s burned down, and now a vacant lot sits beside the bar, edged by chain link like a missing tooth in the smile of a bum.

I'll never forget that Christmas, or any of dozens of other memories of this once great bar. Farewell to an old friend! At least it's remaining a bar. Let's hope for another century of camaraderie and vim.

[Bartenders are responsible for any checks they cash.]