Famous people's places / Detroit – Rivertown
Soup Kitchen Saloon
Closed – archive entry · 1999
Rivertown blues bar and former speakeasy, once billed as Detroit's oldest bar, where Tim Meadows got his start in comedy before it closed in 1999 and was razed in 2006.
01 / The story of this place
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The Soup Kitchen Saloon operated for decades in Detroit's Rivertown entertainment district east of downtown, earning a reputation as the city's oldest surviving bar and a home for blues, jazz and Creole cooking in a building with roots as a Prohibition-era speakeasy. Comedian Tim Meadows, later a longtime Saturday Night Live cast member, got some of his earliest stage experience doing improv at the Soup Kitchen in the 1980s. The bar's fortunes turned in the late 1990s when the City of Detroit assembled Rivertown real estate for a planned $250 million casino redevelopment; the casino deal collapsed, but not before demolition crews and redevelopment pressure had scattered many of the district's longtime tenants. The Soup Kitchen closed in 1999 and stood vacant until it was demolished in 2006. The site on Franklin Street near the riverfront has since seen little redevelopment, and no marker recalls the bar today.
- Long billed as Detroit's oldest surviving bar
- Housed in a former Prohibition-era speakeasy
- Tim Meadows performed early improv here in the 1980s
- Closed in 1999 amid a failed Rivertown casino redevelopment
- Demolished in 2006
Famous Detroiters
Famous people tied to this place 1
Lexicon entries for the people who lived, worked, performed or liked to spend time here.
- Tim Meadows born 1961 · comedian, actor
Performed here
Rivertown blues bar and former speakeasy, once called Detroit's oldest bar, where Meadows began doing improv. It closed in 1999 and was demolished in 2006.
Sources & fact check · Checked: 2026-09-25
An independently written bilingual guide. This collection is not an attendance-based ranking.
03 / Events
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