Out of This World
If you're out and about and would like to take your pints in a place with some deep, local history, you should make a point of stepping into the Saturn Bar on St. Claude and Clouet.
There's a funky hominess to the place. It's charmingly dilapidated and steeped in NOLA history.
Two vintage neon signs with multicolored rings frame the bar, which offers a quirky and affordable mix of domestic beer and cocktails. A pair of leopard print booths line the opposite wall under a mural of a mysterious woman serenely swimming across the sky. There's a coffin in the corner for a defunct record label and random knickknacks filling in the corners.
It's played a bit role in some cinema history, as well. Parts of the Ray Charles biopic Ray and The Pelican Brief were filmed there. Nicholas Cage and John Goodman have been known to pop in.
The main room used to be another bar and is now an open space that was once a boxing ring, but it now hosts weekly events. There's a wooden balcony above it with upstairs seating containing comfy old chairs and more random pictures on the walls. A personal favorite is an almost fully filled-in playoff bracket for a long-ago women's arm-wrestling tournament. A disco ball sparkles over multicolored streamers and a red light's warm glow. The bar's lighting is such that when you're hanging out there, it's easy to feel tucked away from the bustle of everyday life, soaking up the atmosphere in a corner of the world all its own.
After being a grocery store, a pharmacy, and, according to a 1908 newspaper article, a watering hole for longshoremen, the bar was purchased by the Broyard family in 1959, with its name inspired by the Michoud aerospace assembly facility in New Orleans East. Space travel was a hot topic back then, with the first manmade object landing on the moon that year, as well as the "space race" against the Soviets heating up the Cold War for the rest of the decade.
Helming the bar for years was O'Neil Broyard, a classic New Orleans character born and raised in the Ninth Ward, whose family owned it for three generations. His cousin Anatole was born in the Quarter and became a respected literary critic in New York City. A beloved eccentric, O'Neil apparently liked to tinker with air conditioners, which eventually piled up all over the place, making the trip to the bathrooms in the back slightly tricky. Locals still remember his era behind the bar fondly, with local writer Ann Giselson writing wistfully about the place in a long and lovely article in Oxford American magazine.
Broyard was lifelong friends with Mike Frolich, a self-taught artist from the Ninth Ward and whose art filled the walls. Frolich was a deep-sea salvage diver by trade who spent hours in the depths of the Gulf of Mexico. His art has been categorized as "high modern folk" and consisted of vivid, surreal, and often celestial imagery of angels, devils, and aquatic lifeforms. His work was described by one critic as coming from the imagination of "a William Blake-like visionary, fantastical, biblical."
Unfortunately, the art is no longer on the walls. On his deathbed, Frolich made it clear that should the bar ever be sold, his art should be taken off the walls and put into storage. He felt that it ultimately belonged to the Broyard family and not the bar. It's a shame in some ways, but it's also bad form to go against an artist's wishes. Luckily, the art is still in storage. Hopefully Frolich's life's work will someday be given the retrospective it deserves.
Hurricane Katrina broke countless hearts across the city and did unfathomable damage, especially in the Ninth Ward. One of its casualties was the Saturn Bar, which was subsequently gutted, and Broyard's heart finally gave out. Kept in the family, the bar managed to survive until COVID hit in 2020, which shuttered places across town. The legendary local hangout was suddenly teetering on the edge.
Thankfully New Orleans is a stubbornly resilient place, largely because of people investing their money, time, and effort to keep it so. Phil Yiannopoulos and Heather Lane, a local married couple, bought it in June 2021 with a little hospitality experience and a lot of love for a legendary institution filled with fun memories.
Promising to keep Saturn Bar's unique vibe going, they have given it new life. These days, the Saturn Bar hosts a variety of live music, a monthly poetry reading series, karaoke nights, viewing parties for Saints games, and DJ Kirsten and Modern Matty's Mod Dance Party, considered one of the best in the city. On some days, Heather makes red beans and rice for everyone.
The iconic original sign was a casualty of the storm, but, as luck would have it, the owners found a replacement that had been living somewhere on the premises. The next time you're strolling down St. Claude, if you see it proudly orbiting a bustling joint that looks to be old enough to remember the first moon landing, stop in. Be sure to raise your glass to the Broyard family, Mike Frolich, Heather and Phil, and a unique part of New Orleans drinking history.
