St. Paul Loses a Link to its Past as Alary's Rebrands

One of the weirdest dive bars in downtown St. Paul (sadly a too-short list) is closing down. Alary's Bar on 7th Street announced it was closing, and possibly rebranding. It wasn't my favorite place, but it was unique! Their odd parking-lot patio alone made it a must-see stop on any downtown St. Paul bar crawl.

Alary's grand entrance.

Alary's has a great, sordid, St. Paul history, and is the last real link to the city's burlesque past, when downtown was seedy and catered to the debauched, as it did since its days as Pig's Eye. 

Along with the Har-Mar Mall, Alary's has the best amalgamated moniker in the East Metro. It's a mashup of Al Baisi and his partner Larry [something]. Baisi was born in West Virginia and became a lineman for the Chicago Bears int he 1940s, playing in '41, '41, and '46. Alary's has been a local Bears bar ever since. 

[The original Wabasha location. after a fire.]

Alary's c. 1956.

It all started with Larry and Al took over a Wasbasha club called the Drum Bar in 1949 and rebranded it, adding a burlesque strip show. This was back in the day when such things were commonplace in both downtowns, and St. Paul needed something to compete with the likes of the Persian Palms in Minneapolis' Gateway. It was located about where the Children's Museum is today.

Here's a review of the place from 1979, penned by now-legendary food critic Jeremy Iggers, then writing for the Minneapolis Star:

“The only strip joint that hasn’t lost its charm… a dark and dingy, almost seamy looking place. The two-story white walls are bare except for few vintage photographs of 40s football teams. Many Alary’s customers look like survivors from another era, middle aged men with slicked-back hair and weather faces. Drifters with week-old beards who walk with a limp. Dozens of single men all slip in to watch severely overweight women jiggle their flesh. There are no glass-enclosed cages at Alary’s, but then the dancers never take it all off, a real burlesque. One stripper wears a towering red bouffant and the kind of feathers and fans that make Gypsy Rose Lee famous. Her legs are wrinkled. You can count the rolls in her stomach, but boy, she sure knows how to twirl her tassles one at a time and strut her stuff with class.”

(See also the press clipping below of a brief political run by a former Alary's stripper.) 

The great irony of the strip shows was that, by the end of his life, Baisi was blind. He lost his sight in an East Side shotgun attack (!) in 1970, but he had a special stool at the back of the bar where he held court and listened to the strip tease. 

An Elvgren.

Urban Renewal marked the end of the old Wabasha bars. Mayor Latimer wanted to take down the old buildings and replace them with the new World Trade Center that still stands at Wabasha and (new) 7th. Like any good lineman, Baisi stood his ground, and simply moved the place up the street to an old paint shop that also has an interesting history. The current Alary's which moved in 1998, is in an old paint supply shop that was run by the parents of Gil Elvgren. You've probably seen Elvgren's work, because he was one of the most famous pinup artists in US history. A MIA art graduate, he painted scantily clad women throughout World War II for Brown and Bigelow, the local calendar company. 

Perhaps channeling Elvgren's lewd spirit, Alary's moved into the old downtown paint shop, and used the high ceilings. Al Baisi's kid took over the place, and retained the sexploitation vibe. Not too long ago, the evening bartenders were all scantily clad women, and there was a live video feed. Then there was the infamous Vulcan groping incident of '05, which is horrible. 

It was also a cop bar, and there was a nightstick proudly displayed on the wall, along with other cop paraphernalia. Not my politics, that's for sure! It makes it all the more ironic that, in 2015, a drunk Forest Lake hockey dad jumped into the Alary's hockey game shuttle and drove it a mile without realizing someone was inside the whole time.

Farewell Alary's! It was a real link to St. Paul's less upstanding history.

Cool, something to beat people up with.

Elvgren's Art Deco paint shop.

The dreaded Alary's shuttles.

Cop and Vulcan stuff.

The Royal Defillibrator certificate.

How it felt to go to Alary's.

I loved the history wall: lost St. Paul.

It's hard out there for an arthritic stripper.

Obscure Local History #8: St. Paul Voters Overturn Gay Rights Protections in 1978

[Tribune headline the day after the vote.]

I was reading the 50th Anniversary Pride edition of Lavender the other day, a short summary of the history of Twin Cities' pride written by Ashley Berning, and came across a fact I hadn't seen before. St. Paul passed protections for LGBYQ workers, a "nondiscrimination ordinance" in the 1970s. But then conservatives, led apparently by the Catholic Church, organized a referendum to overturn those protections. It passed in 1978. 

Here's the passage:

By the end of the decade, however, cultural backlash had begun. Conservatives developed strange unjustified concerns that queer men and women were attempting to recruit children into the LGBTQ community thorughteh public school system, and began mcapiangs to protect the children from such abuse. (If this sounds familiar, it's because its the same rhetoric being used currently in Florida, Texas, Ohio, and elsewhere.)  St. Paul Minnesota nd Miami-Dade County, Florida both reversed their antidiscrimnation ordinances in response, leaving gay teachers no protection from termination or slander. Twin Cities Pride 1978 was held in Mears Park, St. Paul in retaliation, and that year attendees danced int eh rain.

It's an interesting and reactionary moment in St. Paul history, and a reminder (as if we need such a reminder these days) that the path toward human rights is not straightforward. 

Sadly, I can't find any photos online of the '78 Mears Park pride, but I did track down a few other sources about the St. Paul campaign and the anti-gay referendum. It sounds horrible!

[MPR article on the "gay marriage debate" that includes a section on the 1978 referendum.]

[TC Daily Planet column covering the history of the 1978 vote.]

[Sad story from the Star about anti-gay violence in 1970s Twin Cities.]

Return of the Repressed Uptown Loft

[POW MIA bride.]

I'm sure I'm not alone in being mystified by Viagra commercials. Slate grey color scale images of a couple on a cliff watching a sunset in side-by-side bathtubs. Trucks pulling things in slow motion. A sepia toned guy throwing a football through a tire swing. Amber waves of Amber's hair.

These things work in mysterious ways, through the play of semi-liminal images, association and connotation. I'm sure there's millions of dollars of psychology research behind each of these commercials. You can only assume that the Viagra and Cialis ad agencies know something that we don't know about how to talk about sex without talking about sex.

Lately, a less subtle sexual iconography is emerging around the Uptown apartment boom. During construction, a pair of new apartment buildings boasted a series of bro-tastic posters advertising easy sex. The Lime building featured signs saying: "Don't get hitched until you enjoy your year at Lime" and "Tarts welcome." The almost anagrammatically named Elan apartments draped itself in: "You might not remember her name, but her apartment..." Even the brochure for the staid Penfield apartments in Saint Paul have a curious collection of stock images [see photo below]. And of course, last week we were luckily enough to experience the vague porn video provided by the good folks at Nelson + Partners. Minnpost's Steve Neuman wrote the best synopsis of all. Here's the money shot:

Dollar Store Ryan Gosling (still SOCKLESS) gets the fireplace going while Mystery Blonde powders her nose, then they just keep on drinking before clothes start coming off and they go to his sleek, modern bedroom.  The screen goes dark.  

Cut to the following morning, as the sun rises over Lake Calhoun, and DSRG and Mystery Blonde are standing on his balcony in matching white robes. It’s shot from a distance and you can’t see what they’re drinking, but I assume they’ve already put a good a.m. dent in a handle of vodka.  And the credits roll.

The unsubtle message for the viewer: live here and you will have perfunctory, joyless sex with attractive women even if you’re a tardy jerk who shows up one cocktail in. 

Misogyny aside, I'm struck by how all of these "sex and the city" ads seem incredibly stupid. Not only are they hipster snark fodder, they seem to fuel the generational culture wars brewing around Minneapolis development.

But yet... stupid sexy urban living ads spread like randy rabbits. What's going on?

[Close up of a brochure for the Penfield in Saint Paul.]

I'm convinced that the real estate marketing people are up to something interesting. Sex sells, and there's must be something going on here about urban lifestyles and suburban alienation.

In other words, our urban environments have long been tied to particular sexual codes. For example, during the 19th century, unchaperoned women in the city were often assumed to be prostitutes. The Victorian era gave birth to a particular image of domesticity, where the residential suburban home served as a moral refuge from a corrupt and sexually perverted city. In other words, the nuclear family had a landscape. The suburbs offered a domicile carefully composed by Godly, straight, and monogamous women. These landscapes became proper homes for children, refuges from postlapsarian morally ambiguous urban chaos.

Of course this was mostly bullshit. It turns out that women didn't want to be protected from the world, and the city was full of sexual liberation and creativity (gayborhoods are but one example). For the most part, the moral landscape of the suburbs did nothing but cover up any number of of deep sexual problems in ways that provided fodder for generations of authors and filmmakers. (And continue to release themselves through lonely violent men.)

But today we have a new wave of architecture as innuendo. That the Uptown apartment has become an intertwining of urban space and sexual fantasy suggests that we remain gripped by spatial alienation. It tells me that, young and old alike, many still yearn for liberation from the lonely burbs. We want to be thrust back into the hurly-burly of the city street, where it seems like anything can happen.

Laugh as we will, the marketing people know something we don't. (They always do.) Viagra commercials meet Uptown lofts. Brotastic ads for Bud Light Lime rise incarnate at the corner of 29th and Lyndale. Maybe the "back to the city" movement has deep Freudian roots, and our new city represents a landscape of desire that is not going away. The Uptown boom is the return of the repressed.

[An erection.]