Another Dive Down as Timeless Lee's Liquor Lounge Relinquishes

This one is particularly sad, because Lee's was one of the least likely stories of dive bar survival. It lasted in the last place one would think a bar would linger, centered in a vortex of freeway on-ramps, municipal parking lots, homeless shelters, garbage burners, bus garages, and over-built roads on the far west edge of the downtown.

Lee's Liquor Lounge features prominently in the upcoming book that Andy Sturdevant and I are writing about the history of bars and saloons in Minneapolis and Saint Paul, and I was dearly hoping that we could host a reading on the stage at Lee's this fall, when the book is scheduled for publication, accompanied of course by some honkytonk country. It's a damn shame that won't happen.

Lee's also featured prominently in my Taxidermy Tour of Minneapolis bike ride, which I daresay might be resurrected soon before the place disappears. Lee's has the metro area's absolutely finest collection of mid-century bar kitsch, including a fine case of Elvii, and amongst the throng is some fifty-year-stuffed animals, including a black bear in a shriner's fez and a perched cougar.

[Highlights from the 2015 taxidermy tour.]

The story of Lee's cannot be told without mentioning Louie Siriam, and nobody will ever tell that story better than Brad Zellar did in his 1997 feature piece for the City Pages [see below]. I'm excerpting it here because it's not online, and please read it. Zellar chronicles one of the most amazing bar stories in Twin Cities history. Siriam started his working life as a kid sweeping up the floor at a South Saint Paul slaughterhouse (imagine the yuck!), and would end up in his later years meticulously cleaning Lee's each and every night until the formica gleamed in the limelight.

The bar's owner claims that parking is the culprit for the closure, but I am chalking this up to the absence of Louie. Never take a great dive for granted, folks. They rarely last.

[Louie's office and mop rack from the basement of Lee's.]

[Excerpts from and photos of Brad's 1997 column below.]

Louie’s foot is not an attractive sight. Horribly stunted with splayed, twisted toes and squashed arch, it is the casualty of years of foot-binding labor--20-hour days, seven days a week, including many long hours behind a floor scrubber in the dead of night. Clean floors are an obsession with Louie, the man who has owned Lee’s since 1976, Seriously clean floors. Waxed gleaming floors. They mean something; represent an ethic, a correct way of doing things.

…

As Louie likes to say,” the horse that shits the fastest don’t shit for long.”

For more than 20 years Lee’s has been Louie’s bar.

No matter how many hours he worked, nothing he did was going to stop the flight of blue-collar jobs that was taking his best customers and their paychecks out to the suburbs or wherever the hell it was taking them. Street bars like his all over the city were being eradicated. … with 394 wrapped around it like a moat that cut him off from downtown.

For a time Vikings’ great Carl Eller ran a liquor store out of the place that was now Lee’s dance floor. There was a short-lived attempt at a game room as well.

The band Trailer Trash… evolved into a regular weekday Wednesday night gig. “You know, where it’s no big deal to play 200 minutes a night. Where people don’t go to see a band but to dance, to have fun. The band’s job was simply to rock the place…. .. the revamped Trailer Trash … kept right on ripping through their catalog of more than 300 roadhouse and honkytonk staples.

Louie once said, “Nate [the Trailer Trash musician] is very impressive and he puts himself across very well. He’s a real gifted salesman. The whole group is just a bunch of fine young fellows, so clean-cut and likable. … The young folks have such clean good fun, and often they will say thank you as they leave."

...

[Another quote from a regular]: “You know, just neighborhood drinking. Friday nights we’d get all gussied up and come to Lee’s. In the old days there was a jukebox with a bunch of country oldies, and maybe twice a year this band would come in and play. I think that first Wednesday with Trailer Trash there was just Ed the bartender, me, and a handful of other people. And then all of a sudden it was the place to see and be seen.”

...

The marriage of band and bar was successful beyond anyone’s imagination, and led to a couple of major renovations designed to open up the room and improve sight lines.

“Because, essentially, Lee’s is a roadhouse. It’s a bona fide honkytonk right in the middle of a city.”

...

Louie has a favorite word: schmaltzy. He’ll say something’s “almost schmaltzy, “ and that’s the spot-on description of the appeal of Lee’s, with the careful emphasis on almost. There’s certainly an element of nostalgia in the bar’s appeal; the place seems to touch a familiar chord even in people who didn’t grow up in the world of servicemen’s clubs and small-town Saturday night dances… There’s something int he bar’s smoky, paneled 1950s roadhouse authenticity -- with its beer signs, stuffed fish, … that resonates in young urban types who’ve received their notions of Americana from, say, David lynch.

...

Lee and Sally Triemert had run Lee’s since 1962 and when Lee passed away Sally started looking for a buyer.

“I looked at the place a couple times and I had my second thoughts…" [says Louie] "But Mrs. Triemert gave me a real nice deal and I went ahead and bought the bar. … I found out quick that this is a very tough racket that requires a lot of hard work… Every night I was in here, doing everything. I was janitor, bartender, bouncer, and bookkeeper. Seven days a week I was working 21 hours just to pay the bills…"

The bar was once surrounded by industry: Kemps, Munsingwear, McGarvey coffee, Shopmaster, the Boyer Ford dealership -- and Louie depended on the business of the working men and women who sopped in after work to drink and cash their paychecks. Freeway construction just outside his front door cut him off form downtown and the neighborhoods to the north and disrupted business for years… It was the first of “many isolations… right from the get go this area started going through enormous transitions. The neighborhood’s pretty much been wiped out a couple different times.

“The last time I took a vacation, I got drafted," said Louie

Louie is out on the sidewalk in front of his bar with a brush and a pail, cleaning windows.

...