Also shortened to "Saint Sabrina's," or even just "Saint Sab's," the first Parlor was opened by Leslie Bock in 1993 in the Uptown district of the Twin Cities in Minnesota.

Originally, the store was a hipper-than-thou clothier, which somehow managed to cater heavily to both goths and urban cowboys. Since those early days, St. Sab's has increasingly found business in more general retail (weird gifts and a little fetish), and the pierce-and-tattoo business. The store even won the City Pages 1996 "Best of" Readers Poll for "Best Place to Pierce and Burn Flesh."

The flesh business proved to be the undoing of a 1999 attempt to open a second store in the Dinkytown neighborhood near the University of Minnesota's east-bank campus after a zoning ordinance forbade tattooing in the area.

Bock was quoted as saying, "People treat it like a sex shop or a pawnshop--a category that causes trouble, but the only time the cops came to the store was to get a free sucker."

http://www.saintsabrinas.com


Research:
G.R. Anderson Jr. "Hell's Bells" City Pages vol 22 issue 1051, 1/24/01

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