Signs of the past: Hautean Mike Rowe discovers rare lettering on Oak Street building
By Mark Bennett
The Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE — Mike Rowe knows the rush of discovery.
He once unearthed a long-lost recipe for his hometown’s trademark beer, revived the town’s old brewery and gave Terre Haute its first sips of Champagne Velvet in a half-century. Popular leisure spots such as Mogger’s Brewery, the CV Tap Room, Stables Steak House and the Brew Haus all trace their rebirth to Rowe’s passion for restoring relic buildings.
He’s part carpenter, part archaeologist, in a way, of Hautean history.
Rowe recently found another gem. On a similar mission for a group of local investors, he and a crew began peeling metal siding off the old Bent Elbow Tavern at 831 Oak St.
Before they began working, the two-story, corner building looked indistinct, to the untrained eye. Vertical aluminum sheets wrapped its exterior. Dated paneling masked the interior walls.
Rowe had a hunch this place, dating back to the turn of the 20th century, held some hidden beauty. He’s a student of the legends of Terre Haute’s brewing district and its heyday in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. The old tavern at 831 Oak held a spot in that vast legacy. As those legends tell it, the massive Champagne Velvet brewery that stood right across Ninth Street supplied that bar with its own pipeline of CV beer, flowing from the vats, under the road and into the tavern’s taps. The brewery tabulated the bill by reading a meter, almost like the gas company would do.
So, this place’s past has some color.
That’s the part Rowe already knew.
The surprise came when he and his crew began pulling down the aluminum siding. Starting on the northeast corner, they stripped the sheets off the east wall, the one that once faced the old brewery. After a couple pieces came down, one of the guys spotted something and hollered at Rowe.
There was some lettering on the grimy, shielded bricks.
“I saw the ‘R’ and then ‘E,’ and I said, ‘OK, Vanna, give me another letter,’” Rowe recalled, grinning like Indiana Jones.
What they found is a scarce, surviving “ghost sign,” explained Andrew Conner of Downtown Terre Haute Inc. In the early half of the 20th century, businesses used their buildings’ brick exteriors as a canvas for painted wall advertisements.
“As time goes by, the buildings just disappear and the paint fades,” Conner said. “Those are getting rarer and rarer.”
The ghost sign at the tavern, fittingly, promotes the beer pumping straight from the brewery to its taps. With a mix of black, white and colored paints, it urges passers-by to: “Drink Champagne Velvet Beer.” Just to emphasize the message, the word “beer” is repeated, not so subliminally, in larger, block, black letters. At the bottom is the slogan, “Bigger Beer, Enjoy the Mellow Strength.” Just above the ad is the name “Andy Byrne.”
Byrne ran a grocery store at 831 Oak St. in the 1920s, according to research by Terre Haute historian Mike McCormick. Then, around 1933 or ’34, Byrne’s place became a saloon, McCormick said.
The wall advertisement probably got painted in the 1930s, Rowe estimated.
Rowe plans to have the sign professionally restored.
It is one of the few ghost signs remaining in Terre Haute. The most visible survivor is a tobacco wall advertisement, featuring a frog, on the side of the Copper Bar at 810 Wabash Ave. Another can be found at 120 S. Eighth St. on the former WTHI Radio building.
The wall ad isn’t the only element worth saving at the old Oak Street tavern, also once known as the Crown Lounge. The roof’s 22-inch overhang offered Rowe a hint of its architectural roots. “I said, ‘I’ll bet this is an outstanding Italianate,’” Rowe said.
The decorative brackets had long been removed, but Rowe found some antique brackets similar to the building’s original design and soon had replacements up.
Inside, Rowe and his team have taken the remaining, original dark wood and filled in its missing gaps with matching replacement pieces. The woodwork stretches from the floor to the ceiling high above, and some of the original window frames are still in place. On the interior side of that east wall, wood covers a large opening that once looked out at the cavernous factory across Ninth Street. That neighboring facility housed not only the CV brewery until the mid-1950s, but later the Chesty’s Potato Chips factory. Employees at both businesses often finished or started their workdays (or both) with a stop at the tavern.
“Those people would pour out of the plant into the bar,” Rowe said.
Over the years, the soot from the city’s once-busy industrial district stuck to the tavern’s brick exterior. That sticky dust still clings to those walls. The gritty silhouettes of long-gone window shutters linger.
Rowe intends to clean and tuckpoint the brickwork.
Though the final use of the revitalized building will be up to the owners, GLX Enterprises, Rowe said it likely will be available by lease as a two-level tavern, or a first-floor tavern with second-floor apartments.
He’s motivated by the challenge of taking an apparently nondescript, withering building, and rediscovering its classic virtues.
“With this project, there were a lot of people who thought [the tavern] should just be pushed over,” Rowe said, chuckling. “That kind of made me want to do it more.”
The ghost sign is one of Rowe’s inspirational rewards. In an odd way, that less grand, utilitarian metal siding inadvertently saved the wall advertisement it was meant to cover up.
“It’s that post-Prohibition, post-1932, pre-World War II kind of thing,” Rowe said, walking around the sidewalk at the corner of Oak and Ninth streets. “I don’t know how long it’s been covered. If it had been exposed, it’d be gone.”
By the time he’s finished, any ghosts of the tavern’s patrons would recognize its features.
“My thought is,” Rowe said, “to just take it back to where somebody from 1910 could walk in, and it would look familiar to them.”
Mark Bennett can be reached at (812) 231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.
