06 Mar 110 Year Old Downtown Indy Bar Shifts Focus to Craft Beer as a ‘Good, Clean Dive’
by Mark E. Lasbury for Indiana On Tap
My wife (you know her as Walter) and I almost always opt for visiting a brewery when we go out. We like to talk beer with the people who make it as we try to learn more about how they approach their art/science. Rarely do we visit bottle shops, and craft beer bars are places at which we stop on our trips only when we can’t find a brewery with food – it’s just the way we are. Unfortunately, I think we may be missing a group of people who are just as serious about delivering good craft beer as are the brewers.
In the course of talking to people in and out of craft beer brewing, I recently discovered one of these places. The Tavern at 802 S. West Street is a “new” craft beer bar and restaurant, located just a block south and west of Lucas Oil Stadium. The “new” is quotes because the building at 802 S. West has a century-old history as a tavern. Whether it was called a tavern, a bar, or a saloon, the venerable edifice four blocks south of the original city plat has been selling spirits and beer for 117 of the 141 years there has been a building on that site.
For 117 years of its 140 year existence the building at 802 S. West has housed a bar. So it’s strange that the only old picture we have is from the nineteen years it was a drug store. Image credit: The Tavern
The newest iteration of the bar even takes spirits even a bit further; the tenants were forced to switch out the previous security system because the motion detectors were going off every night at 3:00 am and people in the building were smelling cigar smoke and hearing sneezing at night when no one else was present. The history of Indianapolis is alive and well in this building…. OK, it might not be technically alive. The new owners, Megan and John, are very proud of the long history of their tavern; it is a definite piece of Indianapolis lore and has some interesting tales to tell. Upon entering the building, one can feel the “ghosts” of the former tenants, so let’s take a few paragraphs to describe why this building is so interesting.
The first mention of a frame building at what was then 402-404 S. West (the buildings were renumbered in 1898) came in 1875; it was only five years later that the first saloon took up residence. That bar was run by George J. Kenzel, a former wheelwright at the Woodburn Sevrin wheel Company here in Indianapolis. He worked for that company for several years while he lived upstairs at 402 S. West, including the period of time when the famous naturalist John Muir was employed by Osgood-Sevrin and was temporarily blinded by a flying shard of metal.
George’s saloon (what is the difference between a tavern, a saloon, and a bar anyway?) passed through the hands of several people over the next few years, but then Frederick W. Gaul took over in 1888. This wasn’t so strange, since he was married to George Kenzel’s daughter, Louisa, and had been since she was just 15 years old. Gaul had run a grocer’s store in the north half of the building (402) since 1878, the year he and Louisa married. He and George took turns owning/running the bar right through the turn of the century.
John M. Rhodes was a sometimes doctor, surgeon, druggist, criminal, vaudevillian, and movie theater owner, but an all time drunk. Image credit: The Tavern
In 1913, the two halves of the building were joined, making room for just one establishment downstairs. This was the last year that George and Frederick ran a tavern there. Hard times followed, with the property considered a tenement by 1915 – this is what happens when you take away the people’s saloons. However, after this dark time, the building had one if its most colorful tenants. John M. Rhodes opened a pharmacy/drug store in 1916.
Rhodes had been in town prior to this date, with a doctor’s office and pharmacy at 728-730 S. West (just a ½ a block north), but it wasn’t always smooth sailing for the doc and he moved around a bit. He lost his physician’s registration more than once while in Indianapolis, and was charged with doing illegal surgery just before he died from complications of alcoholism in 1928. Isn’t it ironic that he was an alcoholic working and sometimes living at 802 S. West during the only period when that property wasn’t a bar.
Dr. Rhodes was married three times in his life, but his obviously active social life didn’t deter his business dealings. He was the president of the Indiana Motion Picture Exhibitors Association at the same he was running two doctor’s offices, two pharmacies, and was a mail clerk. He and Amzi C. Zaring owned four motion picture houses in Indianapolis, including the Garrick Theater at 2961 N. Illinois (right across the street south from where the dinosaur is exploding out of the Indianapolis Children’s Museum). The Garrick was designed by Louis B. Sullivan, Frank Lloyd Wright’s teacher; unfortunately it was razed in 1960. Over the years, Rhodes even boarded several young men at 802 ½ S. West who worked as film operators, so he could get back some of the money he paid them at the movie theater. Rhodes was a true entrepreneur.
When John M. died in 1928, his son, John W. Rhodes took over the drug store and ran it until 1935. The next year, everyone breathed a sigh of relief when 802 S. West returned to its alcohol roots, first as Surber’s Tavern in the 30s and 40s, and then as Jim and Mike’s Bar around 1950. Soon it became just Mike’s Bar, and Mike (whoever he was) happily served the near south side as such until the 2000s. In 2005, the building changed hands and the new operators took advantage of the coming of Lucas Oil Stadium Kenzel’s/Gaul’s/Surber’s/Mike’s Bar became the Stadium Tavern.
Many old taverns used tokens that patrons could redeem for beer, as change when drinks were priced in between denominations, or for when patron bought a round but you already had a beer. It kept the patrons coming back. Surber’s Tavern at 802 S. West St. in the 30s and 40s specialized in bock beers. Image credit: terapeak.com
It was at this time that Dustin Boyer, now of Sun King Brewing entered the picture. He had previously been a brewer at Rock Bottom, and saw the opportunity coming with Lucas Oil. The corporate owners of the Stadium Tavern brought Dustin on as manager. Under his watch, the Stadium Tavern was the first bar to carry Sun King beer, and soon he moved to Sun King with a full time position. Now he runs Sun King’s quality department and gets to travel with the ownership team to conferences.
After Dustin left, the Stadium Tavern went through many changes of ownership and names – Spencer’s, Bishop’s, Tim Reuter’s (though the building was and is still owned by the same group). This brings us to late 2016 and Megan Postlethwait’s purchase of The Tavern business. She and her husband John did a quick but very thorough refurbish of the property and opened The Tavern only eighteen days later. In the course of their work, they rediscovered the beautiful 1930s era, twenty-foot long wooden back bar with its original mirror and many photographs are on the walls that celebrate the storied history of this bar building.
Megan and John, along with their manager, Lindsey Wall, are rebranding The Tavern as a “good, clean dive.” The food is simple and approachable, but done with an attention to detail that shows. All the meats are smoked in house, and the sauces and other dishes are all made from scratch. It’s a little kitchen making good in the big city. Likewise, The Tavern wants to focus on small Indianapolis and Indiana craft beer as well.
Lindsey and Megan have eight taps, and while a couple of those will always be dedicated to those beers that are bigger and sell well, like how Black Acre always has Old Rasputin, they want to dedicate four-six of their taps to small Indianapolis breweries. As Megan put it, “We’re small and we want to help small.” Not long after they opened, Megan was visited by Danny Webb of Quaff ON!, meeting him through Robert Stipe at Zink Distributing. Danny is also interested in helping small Indiana businesses (more on that in a couple weeks), so he talked to Megan and Lindsey about serving craft beer. This suited Lindsey just fine, she knows her craft beer.
Installed sometime in the middle 1930s, this bar and mirror in The Tavern are worth the trip just as they are. Turned wood and silvered glass take you back to the early post-Prohibition days. Image credit: The Tavern
Lindsey has worked in bar service for more than fifteen years, learning about beer flavors and getting to know the people in the industry. She and her husband are good friends with Dave out at Wabash Brewing, and this has helped her gain an appreciation for what it takes to make good craft beer. Lindsey’s got a plan for The Tavern’s craft beer list. She is looking to have a well-rounded selection, with things for the aficionado as well as offerings for people who are new to craft beer. She sees her role as an educator as well as a provider, giving descriptions of the beer terms that so many of us use everyday and translating them into laymen’s terms for their less experienced patrons. It helps that Megan loves to offer tastes of anything they have on the list, they intend to be a resource to the customers in their beer evolution.
Part of this education process is helping near south siders to discover many of the smaller breweries in the city, especially the downtown. This is why breweries from the area that might not push as much beer out the door, like Wabash, Metazoa, St. Joseph’s, Tow Yard, and Round Town, can be found on tap at The Tavern. Recently they had the Vanilla Chocolate Baconface from Wabash on tap – if you haven’t had it, find it. These are breweries that also share Megan’s love of Indianapolis and small business, so it is a natural fit that they should promote one another. (Note: as of 3/7/17, The Tavern has St. Joseph’s Confessional IPA and Indiana City’s Red Ale on tap for the St. Paddy’s Day season.)
In the future these partnerships might go further, with collaboration beers with small local breweries. But for now, suffice it to say that just south of the mile square is a good, clean dive that can satisfy your penchant for very local, very small batch craft beer. The building reeks of Indianapolis history, the location is just outside the hubbub of downtown, the food is excellent, and you get to support local craft beer that you won’t see many other places. And you might run across a ghost – in how many bars might that happen?
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