Kirmser's Bar

382 Wabasha Street, St. Paul

The queer population or St. Paul is indebted to Ricardo J. Brown, author of The Evening Crowd at Kirmser’s. Without Brown’s published memoirs, Kirmser’s bar would have disappeared from LGBT memory—the fate of many pre-Stonewall bars. The author was a working-class gay Minnesotan who wrote of “the only place we had,” in the vibrant (but declining) days of downtown St. Paul.

The establishment was, by Brown’s account, lacking in décor. Serving a working-class clientele, it had no dance floor, no drag queens, and same-sex displays of affection were all but forbidden. Kirmser’s had two dirty rest rooms, an old bar, a handful of tables and booths, and a jukebox. Straight customers—among them “day laborers, cab drivers, old clerks, pensioners, railroad men, and a few old barflies”—used the establishment during the day. Queer customers kept to the booths in the back of the bar, and they only came in the evening. These patrons dressed inconspicuously; men wore loose-fitted slacks and cropped hair while women wore makeup and bright red lipstick. Outlandish dress and behavior risked losing one’s job, and jobs were precious after the Great Depression.

Owned by an old married couple with German backgrounds, Kirmser’s existed when most of St. Paul’s buildings dated from the 19th and early 20th centuries. One can nostalgically look back at this time, but many of these buildings were subdivided firetraps. For example, Kirmser’s had only one entrance and exit—the front door.

By the 1950s, the City of St. Paul acted to remove aging structures and financed then-modern replacements. Thus, Kirmser’s disappeared with scores of other businesses; the Northern Federal Savings Building, Osborn Tower, and a shared plaza replaced them on Wabasha Street between 5th and 6th. Ecolab Corporate Center occupies these buildings, and office workers now lunch outdoors on the site of Brown’s onetime refuge.