TILT Pinball Bar is getting a new home. The Minneapolis pinball bar announced it will move into the building formerly occupied by the dive bar Liquor Lyle’s, located on Hennepin near Franklin Avenue.
“Taking over this space is something of a bucket list for us,” TILT posted in an announcement of the move to Instagram on Saturday. “TILT was born in Minneapolis and to have the chance to bring this building back to life is incredibly humbling.”
TILT is currently located on East 26th Street in the Whittier neighborhood. The bar first opened in 2017 as a spot for “friends to enjoy a pint and a game of pinball.” Currently the bar has 25 pinball machines, including both rare and popular titles.
The move to occupy Lyle’s will allow TILT to deliver on many of the requests of devoted customers—more pinball machines, more items on the menu, and more space to hang out.
“TILT started as an experiment of sorts; would anyone want to come hang out at a bar that only had pinball? Would anyone care?” TILT wrote in their Instagram post. “You answered this question for us, and helped create this amazingly diverse and welcoming community of people who rally around a great game of pinball.”
According to their Instagram post, the process to make the move to Hennepin Ave. is still in the early stages. With the move to the new space, TILT will soon be known as LITT Pinball Bar, “due to certain reasons”.
Liquor Lyle’s first opened its doors in 1967, becoming one of several iconic dive bars in Minneapolis. For plenty of Minneapolis residents, drinking at Lyle’s was a rite of passage. The bar closed at the beginning of the pandemic and never reopened.
