Roger’s Bar

MADISON, Wis. — The City of Madison’s Plan Commission will determine the fate of a bar with Mob ties during its Monday evening meeting.

Since plans were announced to demolish the Wonder Bar on Olin Ave in order to make way for an 18-story apartment complex and mixed use building, preservationists have worked to try and save the structure.

The restaurant was built in 1929 by a rival gang of Chicago mobster Al Capone. Intentionally built outside of Madison’s city limits, it served as a hub for bootlegging alcohol during the prohibition.

“It’s so cool, it’s a historical gangster tavern,” said preservationist Janelle Munns. “The thought of this building just turning to rubble just absolutely breaks my heart.”

In May, the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation proposed lifting the building and moving it to another parcel of land. Preservationists have since learned, however, the building would be too heavy to carry over bridges and railroad tracks – limiting potential landing sites to Olin Park and the Alliant Energy Center campus.

Since then, preservationists have compiled nearly 2,500 signatures on a petition asking the plan commission to consider saving the building.

“I’d like the city to consider there is another option than this development,” Munns said. “Imagine if the Wonder Bar was left in place and preserved, and a smaller brick building matched in character to the Wonder Bar was built next door? That way we could preserve the character of the building.”

Munns, along with Carrie Rothburd of the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation, are now asking Madison residents to share their input with the plan commission by filling out a form on the commission’s website.

Rothburd said the group is in the process of registering the building on the National Register of Historic Places, but said it’s unlikely a decision could be made prior to Monday’s meeting. For that reason, she’s asking the plan commission to delay its decision.

“There needs to be more room for voice in the development process on the part of neighbors,” Rothburd said. “That is partly that developers and the city of Madison need to value the voice of the community more and make more time to listen to it.”

McGrath Property Group along with the project’s lead architect did not respond to request for comment.

 


Prohibition era's gritty history woven into Madison's Wonder Bar

 

 

Prohibition era's gritty history woven into Madison's Wonder Bar

Dean Mosiman | Wisconsin State Journal 10 hrs ago  0

It was a deadly rivalry that shaped the Wonder Bar.

In 1927, the infamous mobster Al Capone began pressuring rivals Roger “The Terrible” Touhy and Matt Kolb to become partners with him. When the Touhy gang refused, Capone opened several houses of prostitution in Touhy territory, sparking a gang war, according to a draft city landmark nomination for the Wonder Bar submitted by the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation in late 2008.

The Touhy roadhouses were the scenes of several casualties of the conflict, including the deaths of two of the six Touhy brothers and Kolb at establishments in Illinois between 1927 and 1931.

The two-story Wonder Bar, financed by Roger Touhy and built around 1930, is said to have been the site of a shootout, but no supporting evidence has been discovered. The involvement in the family gang by Touhy’s brother, Eddie, who lived in the apartment upstairs, is unclear. But if he wasn’t involved, he would have been the only one of six Touhy brothers who wasn’t.

Originally dubbed “Eddie’s Wonder Bar,” the building’s fortress-like appearance enhanced its myth, which included claims of a body buried behind a second-floor fireplace, bulletproof window glass and hidden compartments for weapons storage in the circular booths set in the building’s towers. The wooden bar is said to have come from Chicago. The basement is unfinished, but the entrance of what is supposed to have been a secret tunnel out of the building can be seen on the east wall.

In 1934, for the kidnapping of Jake “The Barber” Factor, the brother of cosmetics company founder Max Factor, Roger Touhy was sentenced to 99 years in prison at the Statesville Correctional Center near Joliet, Illinois. Touhy, who maintained he was framed, escaped on Dec. 9, 1942, leading to a final brush with the Wonder Bar.

“I need a substantial bankroll, just in case I had to pay off a bribe or get out of Chicago,” Roger Touhy said in the book, The Stolen Years, published in 1959. “My best source was my brother, Eddie. He owned a roadhouse, Eddie’s Wonder Bar, near the state fairgrounds outside of Madison, Wisconsin.

“But getting a meeting with him was almost as tricky as getting out of Statesville,” he said. “The FBI would be sticking as close to him as hogs to a swill barrel. His phones would be tapped. If he got caught with me, it would be a harboring rap for him.”

The intermediary reported back, “There are a lot of guys acting like surveyors around your brother’s club ... They got spyglasses set up on tripods so as to get a fix if you try sneaking up to the joint across the fields or though the fairgrounds.”

Roger Touhy replied, “They’re FBI men. They hang around Eddie’s bar and peek through the windows of his living quarters at night. I told him to have his messenger make damn sure he isn’t tailed when he comes to Chicago.”

 

 

 

Although Eddie Touhy wanted to fix his brother up with a hideout in Arizona, Roger Touhy stayed in Chicago, saying he “wasn’t going to bury myself in some hole in the desert.” He was recaptured on Dec. 29, 1942.

Eddie Touhy died in May 1945.

Roger Touhy was paroled in November 1959 and shot to death gangland-style the next month, his killers never identified.

On the way to the hospital, Touhy allegedly told a reporter, “I’ve been expecting it. The bastards never forget.” (He didn’t actually say that. John William Tuohy)

With little time left, neighbors hope to save historic Madison bar with mobster ties

 

 

 

With little time left, neighbors hope to save historic Madison bar with mobster ties

·        Dean Mosiman | Wisconsin State Journal

·        With no good options, neighbors and preservationists still hope to save a historic bar with deep ties to Chicago mobsters that’s threatened by demolition as part of a development near the Alliant Energy Center.

McGrath Property Group hopes to raze the Coliseum Bar & Banquet, 232 E. Olin Ave., and historic Wonder Bar steakhouse, 222 E. Olin Ave., for an 18-story, $40 million structure, which would offer 291 apartments, 16,000 square feet of commercial space and five floors of parking.

Lance McGrath said he has a history of incorporating older buildings into redevelopments when it makes sense, but that the far smaller scale of the Wonder Bar and its architectural style don’t fit with the current project.

“The building can be moved, but it is a significant undertaking,” McGrath said, adding that it would cost at least $250,000 plus other expenses and that he’d donate the cost of demolition toward a relocation. “The main issue is finding someone willing to take on the project who owns a site within a relatively close proximity.”

The city’s Landmarks Commission said the Wonder Bar has historical value to the city as a rare remaining example of a Prohibition-era roadhouse.

“This is really gritty,” said city preservation planner Heather Bailey. “It’s about organized crime operating at the edge of the city.

“I think that it would be a loss to the city’s history for this structure to be demolished,” she said. “Often our landmarks are about celebratory history, and this place tells a more difficult story about what happened at the edges of the city during Prohibition. These places help us tell a more complete story.”

Online petition

Neighbors who hope for more time to find a new home for the Wonder Bar have started an online petition expressing opposition to demolition and asking that serious consideration be given to the historic value of the building and an alternative to its destruction be sought. If a new location can be found, the group may launch a fundraising effort to support the move.

“The Wonder Bar is a victim of lack of advance planning,” said Carrie Rothburd, a neighbor and member of the Madison Trust for Historic Preservation’s advocacy committee. “At this point it would take a potential owner to drop into the scene with a serious infusion of cash. The best — really, the only — option for saving the Wonder Bar is finding a new location for it nearby as soon as possible.”

McGrath’s proposal will be considered by the Urban Design Commission on Wednesday, the Plan Commission on July 26, and the City Council on Aug. 3. He intends to start construction in the fall.

Notorious history

The Wonder Bar, emblematic of the outposts gangsters established at roadhouses along highways in rural areas and on the outskirts of cities in the 1930s for the illegal distribution of liquor, is woven into the history of some of the most notorious figures of the Prohibition era — the warring Chicago gangs led by Al Capone and Roger Touhy.

Originally dubbed “Eddie’s Wonder Bar,” the two-story, fortress-like structure was financed by Roger Touhy and built in the vernacular style, finished with brick and second-floor apartments for his brother, Eddie Touhy, in 1930.

The establishment stayed in the Touhy family for two decades. After several changes of ownership, Dennie Jax took the Wonder Bar back to its roots as a full-fledged steakhouse in May 2009. The atmosphere remained classic, with a fine-dining ambience, stone fireplaces downstairs and upstairs, and walls holding photos of old-time film stars and gangsters.

Jim Delaney purchased the Coliseum Bar and Wonder Bar in 2017. The establishments were doing well, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced him to close both in March 2020. The Wonder Bar reopened in September, but the Coliseum Bar, which relies on much larger sales volume, opened for a few weeks in June before closing and remaining shuttered. The Wonder Bar closed at the end of May.

Lack of a plan

So far, there seems no simple path to saving the Wonder Bar.

The building, approximately 48 feet by 48 feet, is estimated to weigh between 800,000 to 950,000 pounds, which eliminates any sites south of the Beltline due to weight capacities of overpass bridges, McGrath said.

The estimated $250,000 moving cost doesn’t include expenses to deal with trees, street lights, traffic lights and signage that may need to be removed, and a relocation site would also have to be prepared for the building, he said.

The city Parks Division explored the possibility of moving the structure to Olin Park, but the cost to make it an accessible public space “would be significant and beyond the Parks Division’s capacity to take on without significant additional resources,” parks superintendent Eric Knepp wrote to McGrath this week.

“I support the effort to save the Wonder Bar,” said Ald. Sheri Carter, 14th District. “However, finding the right location and the monies needed to relocate the building will be the greatest hurdle to overcome.”

‘Something cool’

Janelle Munns, a neighbor who renovated a vintage building at 109 E. Lakeside St. said it’s unfortunate the Wonder Bar building doesn’t have historic preservation protection and that it could be incorporated into a scaled-down project — “something cool, something different, someplace that those who care about history and vintage character would like to live.”

“The major roadblocks are time, cost and, above all, lack of advance planning,” Rothburd said, noting that some are also concerned about the project’s height and density.

“But I cannot stress enough that Mr. McGrath is not the villain here. While he has made no changes whatsoever to his plan to reconcile neighbors’ comments with his design, the city has also shown no willingness to incorporate citizen input into planning for the neighborhoods surrounding the Alliant Energy Center.”

“If it ends up going the demolition route, then we would do whatever we can to salvage materials in the building,” McGrath said.

“No one likes to see old buildings get torn down, including myself, but in this case it is necessary to create much-needed housing,” he said. “It will be a significant addition to the city of Madison’s tax base and will hopefully help propel the vision of the Alliant Energy Center master plan and the surrounding Destination District.”