Bar Remembrance: Lone Star Saloon
Many of the taverns in my dive bar book have closed. Here is another. (Which happened to be my book's cover boy.)
Lone Star Saloon
1900 Travis
It used to be that dives were pretty much the only bars you could find downtown. That all started to change in the 1990s with the coming of the light rail line. A nightlife boom was the result, but much of it was composed of oontz-oontz dance clubs that came and went – and continue to come and go – with dreary regularity. Most of the douchebag crowd has moved on, first to Midtown, and then to Washington Avenue, and by the time you read this, they will probably be somewhere else. Welcome to Houston, home of the wandering nightlife districts.
No doubt in large part thanks to its location in the extreme southwestern corner of downtown proper, far from the faintly throbbing pulse of the discos on Main Street, the Lone Star Saloon has observed all this hullaballoo with regal disdain. And thus it remains the dive-iest bar downtown, a title it acceded to when Charley’s 517 (or whatever that bar on the ground floor of the now-demolished Montague flophouse was called) finally closed.
Local songwriter Greg Wood perhaps put it best. “It has a real Deer Hunter vibe,” he says. “I always feel like a Nam vet on my first day back ‘in country’ in there.” Indeed, little of the barebones décor – including the tiny pool table -- you see once you pass the cactus and the bull skull that adorn the front entry was crafted after about 1975. And neither was much of the music on the jukebox – it seems like every time I have quaffed a Busch tall boy or three there, something like Edgar Winter’s “Frankenstein” was playing. And then there’s the barmaid. The Lone Star has been through quite a few, but one has outlasted them all, and is still there at this writing: a French-speaking Vietnamese woman in her ‘60s who likely remembers pre-fall Saigon and the shenanigans of our boys on R&R.
You don’t go to the Lone Star in search of the perfect microbrew or single-malt whiskey or shots with esoteric liqueurs and clever names. You go for the bulk intake of domestic brew and cheap whiskey, and to hear tales of woe from the seedy downtowners who call the bar home. It’s not far from the city’s Greyhound station and it’s right across the street from a huge local bus terminal, so you get your bus passengers from near and far here, some wetting their whistle after a long ride in from Dallas or New Orleans, while others are steeling themselves to face whatever calamity awaits them in apron strings (or stained boxers and wifebeater) at home. Expect some surliness, but nothing buying a round won’t cure. Word to the wise: avoid the bar’s pizza and order in instead.
(Photo: TripAdvisor.com submitter “Adam”)
you didn't say what it has become now, so is it possible this is the rare dive bar to survive in these times?