saintpaulitan
life in the other twin city

Ordinarily, when a bar advertises itself as “clean and cozy,” it’s pretty safe to assume it’s neither. But as far as I could tell, Marty’s Bar, a West Side dive that Patty and I discovered while out on a walk today, lives up to this modest claim.

Marty’s is tucked away in a weird five-sided intersection a few blocks from our house, right across the street from one of the strangest and most claustrophobic liquor stores in the Twin Cities — Forty Acre Liquors — which I’ll have to blog about some other time. I’ve often commented that the West Side feels very much like a small town. It’s a calm, almost rustic neighborhood where kids play literally in the streets, the exterior of every other house or so seems to be in a state of mild-but-benign disrepair, and at least one household on each block owns a pit bull. Marty’s Bar, then, fits right in.

As you can probably tell from the photos, it’s a pretty small establishment, probably no bigger than our apartment — which is to say, not very big. The patrons are of the same kind that you find in every non-hipster dive bar from here to Belle Plaine to Winona: polite but indifferent folks who are probably wonderful people if you get to know them — but who, you never know, might just as easily beat the crap out of you in the parking lot if you disrespect their favorite sports team.

While I’m on the topic of athletics, I should note that Marty’s features a very special attraction: it’s own sports arena. Behold:

This fenced-in horseshoes court, apparently known as the “Frank Bolton Sports Complex,” is located adjacent the bar’s parking lot. I must say that I haven’t had a good game of horseshoes in a while — or ever, now that I think of it — and it does seem like the kind of activity that could be fun after a few beers. (Although, in the arena of drunken pseudo-sports, I’m not sure anything could really beat dangleball.) We’ll have to come back sometime this summer and see if we can get in a game or two.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 20th, 2008 at 6:34 pm and is filed under Saint Paul. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.