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.”
