Five Years After Boot & Saddle: The Solar Myth Era on South Broad

The neon still glows over 1131 S. Broad St. the same cursive "Boot & Saddle" sign that has presided over that stretch of South Philadelphia for decades, first as a country-western bar and then as one of the best small rooms this city ever ran. Walk in underneath it today, though, and you won't find a sweaty rock club. You'll find a wine bar, a coffee counter, and a back room where somebody might be bowing a double bass into pure abstraction. The sign stayed. Almost everything else changed.

Rewind to November 2020. Boot & Saddle, which had roared back to life in 2013 after nearly two decades sitting dark, closed for good — a casualty of the pandemic that gutted independent live music nationwide. In seven years it had hosted more than 1,500 shows and built a reputation far bigger than its footprint, catching future superstars like Lizzo and Sam Smith on the way up and hosting intimate sets from underground royalty like Thurston Moore and Psychic TV, plus regular hometown turns from The War on Drugs, Circa Survive and The Menzingers.

Its operators, who also run Union Transfer, made the brutal math public: they closed the smaller room to protect the larger one. "We cannot sell you a contactless takeout or curbside delivery concert," they wrote at the time — one of the more quietly devastating sentences of that whole grim year. They kept the neon lit through the final week so people could come take a photo and say goodbye.

The goodbye, it turned out, was not permanent for the space — only for the format. In December 2022, the room reopened as Solar Myth, an entirely different animal. The venue is the physical home of Ars Nova Workshop, the long-running Philadelphia nonprofit that has spent years presenting jazz, experimental and avant-garde music all over town without a room to call its own. Now it has one, with exclusive run of the back performance space.

The reinvention is the point. Where Boot & Saddle was a loud, all-ages-adjacent indie-rock box, Solar Myth is built for a different kind of listening: coffee and pastries in the morning, natural wine by the glass, and challenging, adventurous music at night. "This new establishment will be a great new hangout — morning coffee and pastries, natural wines, and amazing music listening all day," Ars Nova said of the concept, which trades the mosh pit for the residency and the multi-night engagement.

Why does it matter which act owns which storefront? Because live-music real estate on South Broad is finite, fragile and fought-over, and what fills a shuttered room says a lot about where a scene is heading. Boot & Saddle's closure could have meant one more dark window, one more bank branch or vape shop. Instead, a homegrown nonprofit dedicated to the least commercial music imaginable planted itself there and stayed. That's not a downgrade. That's a city deciding its weird, difficult, beautiful art deserves a permanent address.

There's a poetry to it, too. A room that spent the 2010s launching indie careers now spends the 2020s giving Philadelphia's avant-garde a listening room worthy of the material — and it does it under the same glowing sign, as if the building itself refused to forget what it was for.

Five-plus years on from the loss that felt like a wound, the honest verdict is that South Broad got lucky twice. The boot and the saddle are gone. The music, thank God, is not.

Sources: Boot & Saddle closes permanently amid COVID-19 (PhillyVoice); Boot & Saddle space to reopen as Solar Myth cafe, wine bar and music venue with Ars Nova Workshop (PhillyVoice)