MINOT (AP) - In the shadow of downtown Minot's hulking former YMCA, across the street from a non-descript garage, sits a hole-in-the-wall bar like no other.

Its interior, plastered with original art, sports antique furnishings and a collection of aging taxidermy. A stuffed boar mounted near the back door models a "Happy New Year" tiara, oblivious that his upper dentures long ago succumbed to gravity.

Elsewhere, a moose head wears a fedora and a deer has donned a cone-shaped party hat.

Patrons sit in ancient chairs at ancient tables, sipping beer, wine or pop and contemplate the vault door that guards only unused pool cues stored for a non-existent billiards table.

Anyone looking for a place to enjoy a scotch and a smoke is out of luck.

This is the Blue Rider, North Dakota artist Walter Piehl's funky, no-smoking bar, created to save what may be downtown Minot's oldest operating wood-frame building.

It attracts an eclectic clientele, from the city's thriving arts community to historic preservation groups to Joe Lunchbucket types who don't seem to mind having to step outside for smoke.

Piehl, one of North Dakota's best known artists, has been an art professor at Minot State University since 1970. He grew up in a Marion family that produced rodeos and provided stock for other rodeos.

Piehl actually named the bar for the early 20th-century German expressionist artists' movement known as Der Blau Reiter (The Blue Rider).

"They were interested in using color," he said. "I identified with them in my work."

The bar's name also preceded its namesake painting by five years. In 1999, another famous North Dakota artist, the late Fritz Scholder, offered to paint the blue rider on the wall, a task that attracted an audience so large Piehl jokes that it exceeded the fire marshal's limit.

Later, Rudy Wall, a Minot State University art student who is now a bartender at the Blue Rider, painted a parody nearby and signed it, "Getoffmy Scholder."

The building is about 100 years old, Piehl says, and was known long ago as the Tick-Tock Tavern. It was abandoned and on its way to ruination when it called his name in 1994. Fearing it was on its way to a date with a bulldozer, he bought it from its last owner's estate for half the listed price.

Then, the question: What to do with it? "It was an awful mess," he recalled.

He says it became a pub by default.

Piehl and his family spent a summer and fall rehabbing it with salvaged materials from other abandoned buildings at Marion and near Minot. Only the bar remains from the Tick-Tock.

The Blue Rider opened Dec. 20, 1994. The art work has come from professionals, students and amateurs. "Pieces come and go. Sometimes they're sold right off the wall," Piehl said. "Sometimes artists want to update their work."

There's irony in Piehl's ownership of a bar. He comes from a family of teetotalers. His mother was an ardent WCTU'er (Woman's Christian Temperance Union). She liked to think he had opened a pop and juice bar that serves a little beer and wine, he said, "And I didn't disabuse her of it."

The focus isn't on alcohol, anyway, he said.

"It's not so much about alcohol as it is about socializing," he said.

"We have a wonderful clientele."