19 Bar

I am not a drinker so I can’t tell you about the drinks… but the people and the staff are very friendly and the pool tables are GREAT.

I have been here several times over the past many years. This is a great local gay bar for hanging out with friends or to hang out solo. This is the oldest GLBT establishment in the Twin Cities. I hope that this place stays here for many more years.
I love that the inside feels cozy and intimate. I think that this aspect is partially what makes this place better for socializing. This is also what sets this place apart from the other gay establishments in the Twin Cities. Sometimes, it is nice to have a smaller area, not have to walk around so many rooms, and to have only one theme instead of several. I love that they have games to play. I am a sucker for their pinball and darts.
For the most part, the employees do a great job at keeping the place clean with minimal clutter. I understand that there is a lot of alcohol involved and that it can be hard to keep the place tighty during busy times. I have had only few issues with cleanliness and messes that have clearly been in one spot for a long time. Therefore, I have almost always felt comfortable waking in here and hanging out with friends.
Those who are expecting to meet new people should not always rely on this bar. The patrons tend to lean towards clicky, which is not the bar’s fault. Unfortunately, a lot of patrons do not like to socialize with anybody except their own group of friends or lover.
The quality of drinks range between average and outstanding. Some bartenders serve their drinks stronger than others. Those who like their drinks with less alcohol may like this place better. I find that early evening and weeknights are when I have the best luck.
If I may make one suggestion to this bar, I would suggest that they hire more bartenders and staff. I have walked in here several times, and they have been understaffed. I have had moments when I have had to wait in line for a drink for up to fifteen minutes. I think that starting with one extra bartender for their busy hours will fix this problem.
As long as this bar continues doing a great job at running this place, I look forward to more good times with my friends.

Drinks are strong and cheap.
Great place to go if you want a very accepting atmosphere. Most guests love chatting you up. Never gone there and not made a new friend.
Don’t expect a traditional gay bar. If you want a club like atmosphere hit up Lush or The Saloon. It’s divey which is, for me, the best part. Very chill neighborhood type of place. Crazy busy over PRIDE since it’s a block from the park.
I smoke when I drink and their heated patio is a god send in cold weather.
Bartenders are very prompt and always running around clearing glasses/​emptying ashtrays.

Fun place. Good atmosphere. Down to earth people with fun darts and pool and cheap drinks. The diveyness actually makes it more fun.

This place is ok b/​c it is an old gay bar and that I can def respect. The bartenders are over it and so is the general atmosphere of the place. Now that I really think about it, I“m not sure if I’m mixing up this bar with another gay bar in some Midwestern city like Windsor or Columbus. I can’t remember. I think they sell Heggies Pizza and have a lot of smokers on the patio.

As another reviewer said, this isn’t a five star review because it’s the classiest place i can think of… It’s just very comfortable with a variety of characters, plenty of games, good music, and active environment. Friday and Saturday nights are very busy, but go in before 4p on any day and you’ve pretty much got the place to yourself (which is great if you want to snag some games of pool).

It was my first time there last night and I thought it was great! It’s definitely a dive– my favorite kind of bars. The 19 has pool tables, dart boards, cheap drinks, friendly waitstaff and I bet even more that I didn’t seek out. Cheers 19 Bar! Until we meet again.

Come for the beer, stay to find a husband (no really, so many couples meet here). Easily the most «chill» gay bar in Minneapolis. Most of the bartenders are really nice usually. Pool league on Sundays. Be sure to get the greasiest pizza ever while you’re at it (such yum)!

This is a dive bar for sure. If you like stiff drinks, dark environments, playing pool with friends, picking songs on jukeboxes, and smoking sections filled with chain smokers then you will love the 19! It’s a great neighborhood bar where everybody knows your name.

After reading some negative reviews about possible dirtiness or dinginess of this place, it was much better than I expected. Bigger than it looks from the outside, and has 2 (3?) well-​kept pool tables. Also a Big Buck Hunter game, extremely cheap beers ($ 2), and the usual music you would expect to hear at a gay bar (Madonna). Bathrooms were perfectly clean on my one visit, contrary to what some other reviewers have said.
I have only been once, and it was Halloween, so that was a lot of fun due to it being very crowded and having a costume contest.
I get the impression that this is a home base for older gay men more than younger, seeing as how the best costume of the night was Inspector Gadget, and almost no one knew what that was! (Maybe young people don’t know this either anymore but these were not young people inquiring).
It smells old and there are no windows, but that’s what you want in a dive bar right?

Dark, but friendly. I’ve never found it «creepy» inside, (in fact if things get sketchy outside, it’s nice to know it’s there!) just dark and divey and very uninterested in expanding the clientele to straight voyeurs versus the odd straight visitor. I don’t mind you guys really, as long as you shut up and do as in Rome to some extent, we’re totally fine.
Cheap, reliable, very much what-​it-​is. Music hasn’t really changed since 1987.
It’s a guy’s crowd primarily, but sister-​friendly enough. You will NOT be hit on or treated as exotic fauna, Yay!

standard gay dive. well priced pitchers, friendly clientele, a slightly tougher time getting a drink if you’re a woman.
I’m giving it 5 stars under the pretense that it’s a dive, not because it’s where I want my wedding reception held. I like it here because it’s casual, gay, and even though it’s male dominated, nobody’s ever been a prick to me for being a gay girl in a gay man’s world.

I like the 19… it’s casual and the drinks are great. Pool tables are available. Its a great place to hang out with friends and make new ones.
One thing that amused me was that in the middle of afternoon during pride, a group of us decided to go there after hitting the festival. At 2pm, we walked in and could barely see. They keep it pitch dark, even during the day… perhaps shaking up the daytime atmosphere versus night crowds would help with the «creepiness» factor that some other folks describe… make it a little more inviting.

Outside of the bar looks a bit creepy since there aren’t any windows that let you see inside, maybe that is for some historical purpose since it has been around for a long while. Inside is a cozy and dark drinking space.
I often forget that 19 Bar is a gay bar. Crowd is diverse, cheap pitchers of beer, a handful of pool tables and a jukebox. Good place to go with friends to shoot some pool and relax.

It’s amusing to read reviews and hear from acquaintances about the «creepiness» of the 19 Bar. It’s as if the idea that a man might flirt with you at a gay dive bar is somehow as difficult to process as theories of dark matter and the multiverse. Yes, if you spend an evening in a gay dive, there’s a chance a gay guy will — GASP — make eye contact with you. That’s how all bars, hetero and homo, work. Get over yourself. Besides, my mother tells me I’m handsome all the time, and only one man has ever hit on me at this joint — and he might’ve only been trying to cut in front of me at the jukebox.
This is a bar with character and history. These can often be ineffable qualities, but you know it when you feel them. Good bars have auras. The moments you experience feel inevitable, built from the momentum of incalculable events over the years that give the inner workings of the place its own, magical logic. I felt that here.
I’m sure plenty of people have ducked into the19 bar for what they thought would be a novel experience, if not an outright freak show story they could relay to friends in the future. «Guess what I did this weekend… I WENT TO A GAY BAR.» Well, be drawn by the spectacle if you must, but be won over by the soul.
First tip: go during a weeknight, or if you visit on a weekend hit the bar early. The line for drinks tends to stretch after 11 pm. The bartenders handle the bustle with grace and aplomb, but the wait can be significant due to the volume of customers at peak hours.
The drinks are very well priced, and the bartenders pour like they’re throwing a heavy switch. I had myself a whiskey and split a pitcher of beer. I went with another straight dude and a woman, and none of us felt anything but welcome. Well, that and drunk by the second round.
I went on a Saturday night (yep, against my own advice), and I had a full experience: played a game of darts; spent half an hour refamiliarizing myself with the old school Pac Man game; struggled through a couple games of pool (try not to clog up the tables, people are waiting); sorted through the gay ass jukebox. When I say gay ass jukebox, I mean: AWESOME. Look, at the risk of being accused of generalizing and stereotyping, gay people know how to have fun better than straight people on the whole — unrestrained, unfiltered fun. I think there’s something about a lifetime of persecution and living on the margins that frees a person up where you might think it would shut him down. The jukebox reflects that: a lot of upbeat music, dance music, 80s and 90s guilty pleasures. Fantastic.
I love evenings that begin or end at the 19 Bar, and evenings that begin or end in that area in general. The area has a very strange feel to it, a postapocalyptic vibe — it often feels to me like there’s a limitless potential for adventure or mishap. In the afternoons and early evenings the sky is full of jumbo jets and the noxious smells of a city too busy to clean up after itself. Traffic is an endless cycle of Somali women in headwraps driving minivans. The highway runs through the heart of it all, and there’s steel, hardness, the constant hum of noise pollution. The location looks surprisingly vibrant in the day, peculiarly bleak at night, overwhelming darkness interrupted here and there by pockets of unforgiving florescent light from doorways and street lamps that look one strong storm away from falling over. There was such a storm the other night, and the bars were packed because so many people had lost electricity. The 19 Bar was open because… well, because of course it was.
I went home from the bar with a woman who I initially assumed was a lesbian. We did what silly, drunken, confused people in their early 30s do, and the sad truth is she passed out in the middle of it. I can’t remember her name, and I doubt she remembers mine. Her face tapered inward from below her eyes to beneath her cheeks, giving her the look of a light bulb with a tuft of hair glued on top. She was thin to the point of fragility. I don’t usually go for brittle looking women; in general I like to feel that I am pressing into something when I have sex, like a key into a mold leaving a memory of itself for later replication.
Anyway, in the middle of the night I sat still in her bed while she slept and let myself be seized by the sounds in the Steven’s Square neighborhood, carried away from my own thoughts at times, deeper into them at others. Whenever I crash in this hood I’m struck by the unique noise of nights here: a sort of lost and depressing spiritual, the sound of decay. An occasional animal-​wail of lamentation or a deranged laugh cuts through the night. The world starts to feel like a decision I got wrong.
I went way off course with those last two paragraphs. Let me end this review now. See what the affordable pours of whiskey at the 19 Bar will do to you?

The only dive bar and in my opinion the best damn watering hole on Eat Street. I am not sure of which between the 19 and The Townhouse is the oldest gay bar in the state, but nevertheless, this is a kick ass dive bar that caters to everyone. Dart boards, pool tables, awesome smoking patio, strong drinks and YES, $ 8 pitchers. Lively entertainment, mostly the hipsters, and of course the occasional middle aged libertine who is as horny as a toad.
[Shout out to the 37 senators (& Gov. Dayton) who passed the legalization of same sex marriage… to the 30 opposed, y’all must be sweatin’ now like a pedophile in a nursery]

I came here with a few other Unilocalers after the Unilocal du Nord event.
The drinks are cheap and strong and I appreciated that the crowd was attentive to the music selection. Also, pool seemed to be a big thing there so try not to get in the way while socializing or watching.

When gearing up for my trip to Minneapolis, I kept on hearing how nice the people are there. «They’re so friendly, so welcoming.» Honestly, the only time this was the case was with the homeless or crazies on the street. Midwestern charm seems to be very fake here.
When venturing out with my co-​worker after a long day of meetings, we were looking forward to finding a cool (and divey) gay bar full of friendly midwesterners. He kept saying how he needed to get his flirt on… I was just coming along for the booze.
People here? Not so nice… Honestly, the bartenders were curt and unfriendly. At least throw a smile in our direction. Crowd was alright, again no friendly midwestern charm to find here. Yet, the place was not threatening or intimidating. I guess it would be a cool place to hang out in if you had a larger group of friends… not so good when your silly co-​worker wants a cute boy to talk to.
Bar itself? Divey, with a touch of 80s and 90s memorabilia charm. Drinks were cheap, yay drinks! There is a patio if you actually still smoke… its an ashtray out there if feel the need to wander out there. And you can play pulltabs here.
Apparently, this is the oldest gay bar in Minneapolis… guess that’s cool.

This is the gay VFW in the Twin Cities! Domestic pints are always $ 2 and a pitcher is $ 8. They have darts, pool tables and a hip juke box. Staff is incredibly friendly and they know everyone.
The 19 is perfect for small groups or your lonesome. Not to worry if you show up alone, you’ll find a friendly face… or should I say, a friendly face will find you ;)

Boyfriend and I walk by this place all the time to go to another pub and finally bit the bullet and went in on a Thursday night. I don’t know why, but I expected a record player to come to a screeching halt and eyes immediately drawn to us (I’m black, he’s Jewish, we’re holding hands).
Needless to say, nobody gave a crap! :) It was fantastic and totally awesome. We got a couple stroooong drinks and played on the little game machine thingie and pinball. They also have darts and pool tables.
I’m ashamed to think we wouldn’t be welcome but the opposite couldn’t have been more true. My bad-we’ll definitely be back!