Saloon doors: what were they good for?

August 23, 2005 12:56 PM

Inspired by a stray comment in a blue thread about a fancy new Japanese door, I'm wondering the same thing: what was the functional point of the saloon door?
posted by tegoo to Technology (13 answers total)

It blocks the direct view into the bar from the street.
posted by Pollomacho at 1:00 PM on August 23, 2005

Incidentally in most Mexican states they have laws restricting direct views from the street into bars (and churches). They solve this by putting up a partition wall in front of the door that you must step around to enter. Either that or they serve food and call themselves a restaurant.
posted by Pollomacho at 1:02 PM on August 23, 2005

So in the movies when some rough-necked hombre starts a barfight, that the hapless victims of his man-sized fists can easily fly into the streets and into the horses' troughs as whiskey bottles smash and the player piano rattles on... Come on man, haven't you ever seen a Western?
posted by Robot Johnny at 1:57 PM on August 23, 2005

Pollomacho has it.
posted by Smart Dalek at 2:35 PM on August 23, 2005

It used to be the same in the UK, hence all the frosted glass pub windows. We had doors though. Beads at least.
posted by fire&wings at 2:42 PM on August 23, 2005

I like Pollomacho's answer, but I would guess that it's also important that it reveals a lot of the saloon, too. The saloon door is open and closed at the same time, offering some privacy, but also tempting people outside with the goings on inside.

At some point, it also became a symbol of a saloon. A sign might read saloon, but the swinging, mid-level doors announce it just as well.

(And what an easy door to get through when you're smashed.)

But this is a guess. I also noted the comment when I was reading the Japanese door thread.
posted by kingfisher, his musclebound cat at 2:43 PM on August 23, 2005

And it keeps the wild horses out!
posted by trevyn at 2:50 PM on August 23, 2005

Hmm, besides killing my back button, that site fails to completely answer the question.

Most had the usual swinging doors, often embellished with frosted glass. The windows were often covered with grills or posters to block the view of the inside.

I take the windows in the second sentence to refer to the large saloon windows (portrayed by sugar glass in movies), not the occasional embellishments to the door. (The other sentences made it clear this was a list of features common to saloons.) Blocking the view fails to answer other questions: why not a full door? why not beads or cloth? (my knowledge however is purely from hollywood set design and not from a comprehensive survey of saloons, informed reading, or channeling).

And parentheses are the saloon doors of punctuation (at least today I think they are).
posted by kingfisher, his musclebound cat at 2:52 PM on August 23, 2005

(thanks for asking this, tegoo. I'd meant to after posting that to the Blue but plum fergot)
posted by selfnoise at 3:04 PM on August 23, 2005

well, beads or cloth would tangle up or get dirty, or mess with your hat.
posted by Iax at 4:51 PM on August 23, 2005

I kind of assumed that it wasn't a full door because it was hot, and bar owners wanted some circulating air. And the fact that beads would mess with your hat is a good point.
posted by emyd at 5:11 PM on August 23, 2005

actually, a lot of saloons didn't have those kind of doors ... look here and go through these photos and see there was quite a variety ... no 8 had them ... but no 11 is a ramshackle log cabin and no 15 looks like a tent

that reminds me of a joke ... man goes into a bar where people are fighting, breaking up the furniture and throwing each other through the window ... when things calm down, he goes up to the bar and orders a beer

"there you go ... 100 bucks"

"a 100 bucks for a beer?"

"do you have any idea what my overhead is with this going on every night?"
posted by pyramid termite at 10:35 PM on August 23, 2005

I'd imagine that such doors were extremely useful. They closed easily on their own, so you didn't have to pester people to do it every few moments. No other design really accomplishes this, especially not a big door; and beads are pretty, well, high-maintainance. So long as it stayed warm outside, these doors fulfilled the city codes requiring saloons to be separated from public space while keeping the saloon easily accessible to all who wished to enter.

However, as mr. termite points out, not many saloons west of Mexico could've had such doors. It gets cold, even in places like Santa Fe, too cold for those doors to be worthwhile for more than three months out of the year.
posted by koeselitz at 3:24 AM on August 24, 2005