With all the recent kerfluffle over the comment of a downtown saloon owner considering turning the former Sid's Liquor store into a new bar featuring live music, similar to the legendary Pomp Room, or potentially named The Pomp Room, I got to thinking about what the local scene is looking like these days.
It occurs to me that a lot of the legendary sketch factor has been lost to the ages. My idea of dive bar probably wouldn't make the cut for the third D in Guy Fieri's idea of DDD. A good dive bar is dark, located in an area you're not quite sure you should park your car, smelly (once with the combination of stale beer and stale smoke), some broken furniture (like the booth with the spring that pokes your butt or a chair missing a back), and when it comes to food either a glorious cheeseburger or perhaps only a rack of potato chips and beer nuts and a jar of pickled turkey gizzards. These are places where you can generally find a group of regulars that not only day drink, they morning drink. Ideally, the place has been a somewhat recent crime scene- people forget there was a stabbing at the Pomp Room in the 1990s.
About the time the Pomp Room closed down, the Sioux Falls dive bar scene started disappearing in earnest. Let's take a little inventory to clear up what sorts of places I mean: Smoe's, certain iterations of Skelly's, Phil's Corner, The Arrow Bar, The Rainbow, The Lime Light, the original Crow Bar, The Stockman's, The Sportsman's, and the mac daddy king of all dive joints- The Frontier. Now, there's a memory, or rather a foggy string of vague semi-connected recollections. If the front of the house wasn't scary enough, with semi-catatonic patrons and people eyeing you wondering why you are in there, you could push through the back doors of swinging plywood where there was a stage set up for the, ummm, errr, "performers" and a bunch of bicycles lined up against the back wall that Charlie Johnston had collected for the law enforcement bike give away.
It seems like a lot of these sorts of places are gone, but a few are most definitely disbursed around town. I think people like to wax romantic about the old dives as they stand in line to get into the latest greatest strip mall sportsy, chicken wing-serving bar and grille. I don't often find lines to get into the Coalinga or Walter's Hi Ho. But if you want to go, they are out there, here's a short list: Little Coalinga (a cheeseburger nirvana), Walter's Hi Ho just up the street, Silver Moon over by the Farmer's Market, Log Cabin, just to name a few. These are great places to go check out, and I strongly encourage people to do so. I suspect we may lose a few more as 8th Street starts to change as the rail switching yards are relocated.
What else makes your list?
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