Indications of the past: Hautean Mike Rowe discovers rare lettering on Oak Street constructing
By Mark Bennett
The Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE — Mike Rowe is aware of the hurry of discovery.
He at the time unearthed a extended-dropped recipe for his hometown’s trademark beer, revived the town’s aged brewery and gave Terre Haute its initially sips of Champagne Velvet in a 50 percent-century. Popular leisure spots these types of as Mogger’s Brewery, the CV Tap Space, Stables Steak Home and the Brew Haus all trace their rebirth to Rowe’s enthusiasm for restoring relic buildings.
He’s component carpenter, portion archaeologist, in a way, of Hautean record.
Rowe a short while ago located yet another gem. On a related mission for a group of neighborhood investors, he and a crew commenced peeling metal siding off the previous Bent Elbow Tavern at 831 Oak St.
Just before they commenced doing the job, the two-tale, corner making seemed indistinct, to the untrained eye. Vertical aluminum sheets wrapped its exterior. Dated paneling masked the inside walls.
Rowe experienced a hunch this location, courting again to the transform of the 20th century, held some concealed attractiveness. He’s a student of the legends of Terre Haute’s brewing district and its heyday in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. The aged tavern at 831 Oak held a spot in that huge legacy. As people legends explain to it, the substantial Champagne Velvet brewery that stood correct across Ninth Road provided that bar with its personal pipeline of CV beer, flowing from the vats, underneath the street and into the tavern’s taps. The brewery tabulated the bill by looking at a meter, pretty much like the fuel firm would do.
So, this place’s previous has some color.
That’s the aspect Rowe now realized.
The shock came when he and his crew commenced pulling down the aluminum siding. Starting on the northeast corner, they stripped the sheets off the east wall, the 1 that after faced the old brewery. Soon after a pair parts arrived down, 1 of the men noticed something and hollered at Rowe.
There was some lettering on the grimy, shielded bricks.
“I observed the ‘R’ and then ‘E,’ and I stated, ‘OK, Vanna, give me a different letter,’” Rowe recalled, grinning like Indiana Jones.
What they found is a scarce, surviving “ghost signal,” defined Andrew Conner of Downtown Terre Haute Inc. In the early half of the 20th century, companies made use of their buildings’ brick exteriors as a canvas for painted wall commercials.
“As time goes by, the buildings just disappear and the paint fades,” Conner mentioned. “Those are having rarer and rarer.”
The ghost indicator at the tavern, fittingly, encourages the beer pumping straight from the brewery to its faucets. With a blend of black, white and coloured paints, it urges passers-by to: “Drink Champagne Velvet Beer.” Just to emphasize the concept, the word “beer” is recurring, not so subliminally, in larger, block, black letters. At the base is the slogan, “Bigger Beer, Delight in the Mellow Toughness.” Just earlier mentioned the advertisement is the name “Andy Byrne.”
Byrne ran a grocery shop at 831 Oak St. in the 1920s, according to study by Terre Haute historian Mike McCormick. Then, all over 1933 or ’34, Byrne’s place became a saloon, McCormick stated.
The wall ad most likely got painted in the 1930s, Rowe approximated.
Rowe strategies to have the indicator skillfully restored.
It is a person of the several ghost signals remaining in Terre Haute. The most obvious survivor is a tobacco wall advertisement, showcasing a frog, on the aspect of the Copper Bar at 810 Wabash Ave. Another can be located at 120 S. Eighth St. on the former WTHI Radio building.
The wall advert is not the only ingredient worthy of preserving at the outdated Oak Road tavern, also the moment identified as the Crown Lounge. The roof’s 22-inch overhang provided Rowe a hint of its architectural roots. “I said, ‘I’ll bet this is an outstanding Italianate,’” Rowe said.
The ornamental brackets had long been taken off, but Rowe discovered some antique brackets similar to the building’s original design and style and quickly experienced replacements up.
Inside, Rowe and his crew have taken the remaining, initial dark wood and stuffed in its lacking gaps with matching replacement parts. The woodwork stretches from the ground to the ceiling superior previously mentioned, and some of the original window frames are nevertheless in put. On the interior facet of that east wall, wooden covers a substantial opening that once appeared out at the cavernous manufacturing facility across Ninth Street. That neighboring facility housed not only the CV brewery until finally the mid-1950s, but afterwards the Chesty’s Potato Chips manufacturing facility. Workers at both equally corporations often finished or started off their workdays (or equally) with a stop at the tavern.
“Those individuals would pour out of the plant into the bar,” Rowe mentioned.
In excess of the a long time, the soot from the city’s at the time-chaotic industrial district trapped to the tavern’s brick exterior. That sticky dust nevertheless clings to individuals partitions. The gritty silhouettes of lengthy-gone window shutters linger.
Rowe intends to clean up and tuckpoint the brickwork.
Although the closing use of the revitalized making will be up to the owners, GLX Enterprises, Rowe mentioned it most likely will be readily available by lease as a two-amount tavern, or a first-floor tavern with second-flooring flats.
He’s determined by the challenge of having an apparently nondescript, withering making, and rediscovering its traditional virtues.
“With this project, there were being a large amount of persons who thought [the tavern] really should just be pushed in excess of,” Rowe claimed, chuckling. “That type of created me want to do it extra.”
The ghost sign is a single of Rowe’s inspirational benefits. In an odd way, that significantly less grand, utilitarian metal siding inadvertently saved the wall ad it was intended to cover up.
“It’s that article-Prohibition, article-1932, pre-World War II form of factor,” Rowe explained, walking around the sidewalk at the corner of Oak and Ninth streets. “I never know how long it’s been covered. If it experienced been uncovered, it’d be absent.”
By the time he’s concluded, any ghosts of the tavern’s patrons would figure out its features.
“My imagined is,” Rowe claimed, “to just get it back to where any individual from 1910 could walk in, and it would appear familiar to them.”
Mark Bennett can be arrived at at (812) 231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.
Posted by Rob Robbins on 2009-07-20 16:03:19
Tagged: , © Rob Robbins , Champagne Velvet beer , Bent Elbow tavern , Mike Rowe , 831 Oak Road, Terre Haute, IN , “Andy Byrne” , Mike McCormick , Crown Lounge , Beer , Grocery
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