MINNEAPOLIS - In 1950 a bottle of beer at Nye’s bar would have set you back two bits. Stepping into Nye’s today will set you back decades.
With its dingy lighting, piano bar and gold-glittered horseshoe booths, Nye’s is a throwback less to your father, than to his father.
But with its closing date fast approaching, the Twin Cities landmark will not live to see another generation.
“There’s not another place like this in the free world,” says Nye’s' bartender Phil Barker. “It’s an entity onto itself.”
Nye’s had already been in business two decades when Barker, 22 and just out of the navy, came aboard.
“It’s the only job I’ve had,” he says. “I’ve collected one W-2 form since 1969. It’s right here.”
Barker was hired by the founder himself, Al Nye, who still oversees the comings and goings of the operation - more than a decade after his death - by way of a larger than life black & white photo hung near the entrance.
It was 1950 when Nye first put his name on the existing corner bar at the gateway to northeast Minneapolis, or “Nordeast,” as new arrivals to the neighborhood are informed.
In 1964 Nye built a dining room over the bar’s parking lot and named it the Polonaise Room, after a Polish dance - a salute to his heritage.
In 1969 the Chopin room took over the ground floor of an adjacent former harness shop.
Three years after that Nye’s crashed through the wall of an adjoining diner.
Finally, Nye’s was perfectly complete. And it hasn’t changed since.
“You just feel like you’re back in 'Mad Men' times,” says Kristin Wyeth, perched in one of those shimmering vinyl booths, her menu prominently featuring cabbage rolls, sauerkraut and pierogies, just the way Al Nye would have wanted it.
Though the decades passed, Nye’s décor remained as stuck in time as the veteran bartender’s steady stream of one-liners. “I gotta be upside down,” Barker quips. “My nose is running and my feet smell.”
Where else in Minneapolis will one find cloth napkins ten feet and a swinging door from a polka lounge, as popular today with hipsters as it was with the greatest generation that once waltzed and schottisched here, and every so often still does.
The “World’s Most Dangerous Polka Band,” Nye’s house group, was on stage when Liz Westcott entered with her father. “My dad’s like, ‘Get ready, you’re walking back into the 50s,’” she shares.
More like “The Twilight Zone,” Amy Cantwell adds from the barstool next to Westcott.
Soon the Nye’s property will be a construction zone. Apartments and shops are planned as part of the development being overseen by Nye’s current owners, brothers Rob and Tony Jacob.
Rob Jacob says the restaurant never fully recovered after the great recession, especially on weekdays, when business travelers on expense accounts used to keep the cash register ringing.
“Supper club type of food is kind of a dying brand,” says Jacob.
Beyond the decline in business, Jacob says “the building is falling apart,” without the revenue stream to support a renovation.
Besides, Jacob says, if changes were made “then it wouldn’t be Nye’s.”
For Nye’s regulars, the long goodbye is now reaching its conclusion.
“We didn’t want it to end,” said Karen Namie, who remembers visiting Nye’s during the Polonaise Room’s grand opening. “It’s just part of history,” she says. “It’s part of Nordeast.”
It’s possible no one will miss Nye’s more than 84-year-old Vera Strandmark. For decades she’s been among the faithful gathered ‘round the Nye’s piano bar, still singing standards like “Crazy” and “Over the Rainbow,” followed by warm ovations from friends and strangers alike.
“My husband is in a nursing home and he has Alzheimer’s so he can’t come with me anymore,” she says. “But I come because it keeps me alive.”
Strandmark hopes she can follow the piano bar’s host, Daina De Prez, to another establishment. But for now she admits to being “terrified that it’s going to end. I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she says.
Nye’s has already announced a three-day party on its closing weekend. A fitting send off to Esquire Magazine’s 2006 “Best Bar in America.” Nye’s final day in business will be Sunday, April 3.
Cell-phone photos and raised glasses have already become common as longtime customers make one final trip through the squeaky Nye’s front door.
Give credit to a place staying true to its colors, till the day it fades to black.