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And a year later, he signed a lease in the basement of the Hennepin Center for the Arts. He quietly assured his community that he and his partners planned to reopen soon enough somewhere nearby.
His new landlords didn’t want a loud club on the first floor, so in 2018, Jetset threw itself an epic going-away party-I’ll never forget listening to “Ray of Light” as the entire dance floor spilled out onto the patio on North 1st-but Kirihara never felt like he was done. In 2016, his super supportive Jetset landlords sold their building in order to finance their retirement and subsequent move to Italy.
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Jacob Frey, at the time the North Loop area’s city councilperson, mused to the Star Tribune that Kirihara’s influence on the neighborhood should be compared to the moment in The Wizard of Oz when the movie goes from black and white to color.īut every golden age must degrade to silver and eventually maybe something less precious, and only a year after Peter Kirihara Day, it was obvious that the North Loop’s alchemy was in heavy flux. In 2017, Mayor Betsy Hodges declared June 29 Peter Kirihara Day, and 300 people came to a party at the Ford Center thrown in his honor by the Pohlads. He was proven right, after all-the North Loop pioneer turned poster child for the rebirth of cool downtown. He was in his mid-50s and still carrying himself with youthful style and energy-an empowered multi-hyphenate: a successful homosexual-Japanese-American-from-East-Bloomington dude made good. Kennedy, Kirihara’s best friend and Saturday-night DJ.Īnd no matter which spot you were at, or which time of day, there was Kirihara himself, behind the bar, wearing a fresh Yankees cap tipped to the side of his head, giggling at something one of his employees had just said. And its dance floor could go as hard as any Madonna remix being spun by J.R. It was first and foremost a space for the LGBTQ community, but its stylish low white leather banquettes were open to anybody who wanted to dress up and hang out.
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With its big front windows and tasteful little neon sign, Jetset ushered in a totally fresh aspect of the gay experience in the city-it signaled a new spirit of transparency and openness. You only felt assured that there wasn’t a cooler spot to meet friends for an after-work drink.īut the soul of the neighborhood could be found on a weekend night at Jetset, the 1st Street gay bar Kirihara opened in the summer of 2001. Here you could sip a rosé and nibble on a baguette and a cheese plate without feeling the unnecessary pretension that was sometimes served with rosé and baguette and cheese. It was a sunny place, all blond wood and white paint, with coffee and Wi-Fi strong enough to fuel “remote work” before anybody even used the term.Īlso on 3rd Avenue, on the other side of Washington, was Bev’s Wine Bar, opened in ’95, a low-key hang with a loading-dock patio that was a throwback to the neighborhood’s industrial roots.
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A little dingy and smoky when it opened it in 1991, it really came into its own 20 years later, in the 2010s, by which time it was serving a full café menu-pancakes in the morning, tuna melts in the afternoon-to a clientele that looked younger and cleaner and better-dressed by the day.
There was Moose and Sadie’s, the seminal coffee shop on 3rd Avenue North. But who keeps records on soul? Well, hopefully, they’ll track down some old-timer who held onto their wits long enough to sing about the Golden Age of Peter Kirihara, when Loopers from antiquity could achieve full cultural expression solely by living in each of his three neighborhood joints. How do you find the soul of a neighborhood? Years from now, historians will determine their mileposts for the origins of what we now know as the North Loop-they’ll dutifully research whose idea it was to use an old streetcar line as its marketing handle, note when the first mixed-use condo was built, document when it landed its first real grocery store.