Legendary Recipes – History Worth Tasting

Pecan Pie

Tropical Restaurant

128 South Main Street
Brigham City, Utah

1955 – 1968

Morris Artell Nuttall was born in 1908 in Lewiston, Utah, a beet-and-dairy town at the north end of Cache Valley, one of a dozen children of James Dennis Nuttall and Emma Housley Nuttall. He went into commercial kitchens early, and by age 19 he was working at the Hotel Eccles in Logan, where the local newspaper noted that he was “one of the most popular cooks” at the hotel. In 1929 he crossed into Idaho to marry Florence Dorothy Arbon at Preston. Nearly three decades later, he compressed the whole apprenticeship into a single line: he had been in the business, he said, since he was “old enough to stand on a box.”

When his first son was born in Brigham City in 1930, Morris gave him a name — Keith Jesse — and, in time, a plan.

The plan took shape in wartime, and so did Brigham City. In March 1942 the War Department began construction on a 1,500-bed Army hospital on 235 acres a mile and a half south of town; Bushnell General Hospital admitted its first patients that October, and roughly 13,000 wounded soldiers passed through before it closed after the war. Sixty buildings went up at a cost of $9 million. As workers and patients’ families flooded a town that had no beds for them, residents of Brigham City rented out spare rooms and cooked extra meals. It was, for a place of that size, an astonishing infusion of strangers and appetite.

It also supplied an audience. In 1942 a 12-year-old Keith Nuttall boxed an exhibition against his father before an assembly of soldiers, and the reporter who covered it judged the boy a classy fighter. Three years later, Keith — by then billed as the world’s 98-pound champion — was conducting a boxing class with his father in the Bushnell post gymnasium.

Between those two dates the family acquired a famous ally, and the acquisition made national wire copy. On June 13, 1944, Jack Cuddy of the United Press filed his “Today’s Sport Parade” column from New York after catching Henry Armstrong at Stillman’s Gym, two nights before Armstrong was to meet Al “Bummy” Davis at Madison Square Garden. Armstrong — who in 1938 had held the featherweight, lightweight, and welterweight championships of the world at the same time, a feat no fighter has repeated — wanted to talk about a 13- or 14-year-old boy (Armstrong wasn’t sure) in Brigham City, Utah, who weighed about 90 pounds and was still an amateur. He was, Armstrong said, “the most amazing youngster I ever saw.” He had looked over hundreds of boxers, experienced men and boys both, and had never seen natural ability like it.

Armstrong had a further ambition, and Cuddy made it the hook: Armstrong aimed to become the first Black manager to guide a white fighter to a world title — perhaps to three of them, though not at once, the New York commission having closed that door behind him. Through Los Angeles attorneys he had taken a minor’s contract on Keith’s services until the boy turned 21, with an option after that. The approach, though, had come from the other direction. Keith’s father — identified in the column as a “Brigham baker and former professional middleweight scrapper” — had written to Armstrong first, having already refused $10,000 to sign the boy with another manager, on the reasoning that Armstrong dealt squarely and had worn three belts.

Armstrong had not said yes at once. He suspected the old man was oversold on his son. Then, on November 7, 1943, he went out to Wendover to work a card of bouts for the enlisted men, and Keith was booked for three rounds with his father. Armstrong refereed them himself, which is how he came to be standing in the corner between rounds telling the boy how to get around the elder Nuttall’s left jab. Keith went out and put his father on the canvas with a right cross — 90 pounds dropping 160. “Come victory and television,” Armstrong told Cuddy, “this kid will be my golden boy.”

Al Warden of the Ogden Standard-Examiner had ridden out to Wendover with Armstrong that night and gotten the verdict from him in the army car on the way back. “Hey, Al, that kid is terrific,” Armstrong said. “He’s a coming champion.” Two nights later Keith boxed his father again at the Ogden Livestock Show, and within weeks Armstrong had him in Hollywood, where he flattened an opponent in 21 seconds in front of 9,000 people. An Associated Press dispatch out of Portland credited him with 26 consecutive knockouts as an amateur.

It went further than anyone in Box Elder County could have expected. By the following April, Armstrong had the boy signed for 13 exhibition appearances across the country at a guaranteed $7,500 plus expenses, and on the Friday that Keith and his father stopped at the Standard-Examiner offices before boarding a plane for Los Angeles, a wire arrived from Bill Grady, the casting director for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, offering the boy a leading role in a juvenile athletic picture. He was 13 years old and weighed 95 pounds. Warden’s copy called it an Horatio Alger story and then corrected himself: in fact, it was one. The newspaper that had called Keith a Salt Laker in January now called him “now of Brigham City,” which is the closest thing there is to a record of the family coming home.

In 1946 the family put its name on a restaurant for the first time in a way that mattered. Don and Morris Nuttall — uncle and father — opened the Ringside Cafe at 308 North Main Street in Brigham City, and the local paper explained the choice of name without apology: it honored the 16-year-old who had just won the U.S. amateur Golden Gloves flyweight title. Boxing fans in northern Utah, the notice promised, would be glad to see the place open.

The boy was already a specialist. That same year Keith won the Chicago Golden Gloves Tournament of Champions, and a sports editor at the Salt Lake Telegram noted that Nuttall had been training, boxing, and doing roadwork “at a time when his playmates were out flipping rocks at squirrels” and growing up like ordinary children. He turned professional in June 1947, with Armstrong managing him. By 1948 a columnist was already asking the question that shadows every prodigy: “What has happened to Keith Nuttall — the child prodigy of the Utah ring?”

What had happened, in part, was that Armstrong had tried to remake him. Keith had won in Chicago on speed and slashing combinations at arm’s length; Armstrong, who had built a legend by walking through punches to smother opponents at close range, set about converting him into what the Tribune called a “swarmer.” It did not take. The clinching and hugging never suited him, and eventually Armstrong cut him loose — which a Salt Lake Tribune columnist, writing in June 1952 under the headline “Nuttall’s Forgotten Henry’s Teaching,” called the best break of the young man’s life.

By then Keith had a life outside the ring, and it was a restaurant life. At age 21 he was a married father of three and, in the columnist’s phrase, a successful young businessman, running the eating establishment that served the civilian employees at the Indian School — the old Bushnell campus, which the Bureau of Indian Affairs had converted and opened in January 1950 as the Intermountain Indian School, receiving 500 Navajo students in what would become the bureau’s largest boarding school. He worked until seven each evening and still got up at sunup to run five miles of road work. His father was managing the comeback and doing the talking. “He just wants to fight,” Morris said. “He’s mature now and serious about winning the championship.” The Nuttalls wanted Ike Williams — by then a former lightweight champion, dethroned by Jimmy Carter in May 1951 — for an outdoor card in Salt Lake City that summer, and had told the Los Angeles matchmaker Baron Von Stumme they would take anyone willing to stand and trade. “We don’t want any of those runaway fighters,” Morris said. “We want to give the fans a scrap.”

The scrap never came. Keith’s professional career closed out in 1952 after 56 bouts, an injury ending it; the nicknames that trailed him — “Hurricane Hands,” the “Brigham City Buzzsaw” — outlived the record. What survived was the other trade.

Morris had already moved his operation to the middle of Main Street. By 1949 he was advertising the Howard Cafe in the Howard Hotel, the three-story brick-and-adobe pile at 35 South Main that had gone up around 1903, gained a floor in 1914, and been reworked in 1923 and again in 1934. In 1960 its proprietor, J. W. Howard, would run one of the great deadpan advertisements in Utah trade-press history — a notice announcing that the hotel had nothing to advertise but goodwill, since it was already running the Western Union office, the Greyhound depot, and the cab dispatch out of its lobby — and selling a few rooms besides. It had no time to advertise. By 1952 Nuttall was billing himself as owner and manager, an expert in general food preparation with more than 22 years in the famous places of the Intermountain West.

On February 8, 1952, he opened a room inside the hotel and gave it the name that would follow him for the rest of his working life: Morris Nuttall’s new Tropical Dining Room. The advertisements ran a photograph of what Nuttall called “our lovely Tropical Room.”

It outgrew the hotel within three years. In 1955, as Hadfield Furniture prepared to vacate its store two blocks south, Nuttall started remodeling the space before the furniture was even out — and the local paper reported that what he was building would be the largest restaurant in Northern Utah. The address was 128 South Main — which was also U.S. 91, the main north–south highway through the region.

A large display advertisement in the local newspaper blared “Open Today!” on July 15, 1955, inviting the public to visit the new Tropical Restaurant at 128 South Main. A three-day grand opening followed on July 23, 24, and 25. Morris Nuttall was the head chef and proprietor; Keith ran the kitchen under him.

The Tropical Restaurant was a considerable piece of work for a town the size of Brigham City. It could seat more than 300 patrons. Four glass aquariums with tropical fish stood at the front, facing the sidewalk and visible from the Tropical Room just inside the entrance; four more were set deeper in the building. Toward the rear stood the smorgasbord and buffet counter, with an adjoining dining room seating 56. Two more dining rooms, divided by soundproof folding doors, held 60 and up to 80, and Morris would later convert one of them into what the family called the Gold Room. A lagoon mural ran the length of the south wall, unbroken when the folding doors were open, divided into separate scenes when they were shut — a piece of theatrical carpentry that let one wall serve three parties at once. (The aquariums were the least grand thing in the room: not very big, Morris’s daughter Sharon recalled years later, and hers to clean.)

The advertised bill of fare after the grand opening ran to buffet breakfasts, buffet luncheons, and smorgasbord, along with what the Nuttalls called their “famous Hickory-Q ham,” plus turkey, chicken, steaks, spareribs, roast pork and beef, sandwiches, seafoods, short orders, and complete dinners. Four to five hundred people came through on Saturday and Sunday evenings, and the other nights of the week were busy, too.

The kitchen ran on more than the two Nuttalls and their wives. Earl Jones was chef. His future wife, Leora, started as a salad girl and rose to cashier, and the two of them met when he lobbed a dough ball over the top of the ice machine and caught her in the forehead — his way, their daughter Gaylene said long afterward, of showing interest. The salad station belonged to Ruth Hashimoto, and the girls working under her turned out salads, shrimp cocktails, and several dressings a day; Gaylene took her first job there at age 13 as Hashimoto’s assistant. Ronald Laursen cooked there in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The restaurant sponsored a bowling team. And cooks trained in that kitchen went on to run other rooms in Box Elder County: Earl and Leora Jones to their own Earl’s Cafe, and Cleone “Cy” Wight, whom Jones taught, to the Tenth Hole coffee shop at the Brigham City Golf and Country Club.

Not everyone in town ate there. For a good many families in Brigham City the Tropical Restaurant was a birthday restaurant and nothing else, and for some it was out of reach altogether — too expensive for a household with several children in it. The busiest stretch of the year was Peach Days, when Main Street filled and the crowds came through the door, El Kalah Shriners among them.

Volume was not the same thing as profit, and Nuttall knew it. In August 1955 he called on the George S. May Company, a prominent management consulting firm, and the testimonial letter he later gave them is the most revealing document the Tropical left behind. Business was growing rapidly, he wrote, but the operation was disorganized and was not making enough money. He was 48 years old. He had run his own house in another location for five years, and he had chosen the new site deliberately, because its physical layout and its ability to pull trade from the surrounding country put him in a better position to build something solid and substantial. Then he explained himself: “I am a perfectionist.” Everything, he said, had to be just right. And, to make the point concrete: “To me, a piece of pie must be a good piece of pie.”

The timing was better than he could have known. In late 1956 the Thiokol Chemical Corporation began building a solid-fuel rocket plant on 10,000 acres at Promontory, 30 miles west of Brigham City; the first buildings were finished in February 1957 and the plant held its grand opening that October 17. The U.S. Air Force contract for the first stage of the Minuteman missile followed. Engineers and their families arrived almost overnight, and by one Thiokol manager’s estimate the plant pumped an average of $3 million a month into the local economy across its first decade. Brigham City acquired Lutheran, Catholic, Buddhist, and Jewish congregations it had not had before. It also acquired a wage floor that local businesses struggled to match; Thiokol’s pay made it hard for Main Street operators to keep their help.

It also brought the boom onto the Tropical Restaurant’s own block. In October 1958 Thiokol leased the former Hadfield Furniture building at 120 South Main — about 2,000 square feet, vacant since that summer — and remodeled it for the plant’s employment section, the third office the company had taken in Brigham City in six months. John Higginson, the Utah plant manager, told the paper that roughly 125 people were being hired every month, most of them technically trained. Thiokol was now doing its hiring a few doors up the street from the restaurant.

The Tropical Restaurant rode the boom. In March 1958 the local newspaper reported that it was among three Brigham City restaurants recommended in the new edition of Adventures in Good Eating, the others being the Idle Isle Cafe and the Maddox Ranch House. They were among 3,000 selected eating places in North America listed in a 352-page guide then in its fiftieth printing, published by the Duncan Hines Institute of Ithaca, New York. The recommendations, the publisher said, rested on Hines’s own appraisal, the suggestions of his friends and associates, and thorough inspections by a professional field staff of 20. Hines never sold advertising in the guides, and by the 1950s a plaque bearing his name in a restaurant window carried real weight. (Hines died the following March.)

A period advertisement gives the clearest surviving picture of the operation at its peak. In the March–April 1960 issue of SUP News, the bimonthly magazine of the National Society of the Sons of Utah Pioneers — an issue given over almost entirely to Corinne, Promontory, and the coming 91st anniversary of the golden spike — the Tropical Restaurant bought a panel on page 18. The copy reads like a menu board: Chick-A-Dee Chicken, charcoal broiled steaks, infra-red chicken, infra-red prime rib. Smorgasbord on Saturday and Sunday, $2. Buffet lunch, $1, all day to five o’clock. Banquet room for 200. Closed Thursdays. The signature at the bottom read “Morris and Keith Nuttall,” and above it a single line of institutional loyalty: they were proud to serve the SUP. The chicken at the head of that copy was not a house recipe. Chick-A-Dee was a franchised fried-chicken program sold by territory, mix and equipment together; Hoffman’s Supper Club on Washington Boulevard in Ogden had bought the area rights in the autumn of 1957 and advertised the dinner, regularly $1.50, at 98 cents to introduce it — alongside charcoal broiled steaks, the same pairing the Tropical Restaurant would run.

The company that advertisement kept is worth noting. Eleven pages earlier in the same issue, a quarter-page banner ran for the Maddox Ranch House just south of Brigham City — the log-cabin operation Irvin and Wilma Maddox had built on skids in Perry in August 1949, on ground everyone told them was the middle of nowhere — inviting readers to experience the thrill of eating there on their way to the railroad museum. The Tropical Restaurant was the gathering place for the town; Maddox Ranch House was a stopping place on the highway.

Hollywood came through as well, on Monday evening, January 11, 1960. Joi Lansing — born Joy Rae Brown in Salt Lake City in 1929, signed by MGM as a teenager, and known to television audiences of the moment as the shapely model on the Bob Cummings Show — ate dinner at the Tropical Restaurant with her uncle, Raymond Shupe of Ogden, and assorted other friends and relatives. She was taking time off from acting to visit her native state. She is remembered now for the long opening shot of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, in which she is Zita, the dancer riding beside a bomb, complaining to a border guard about a ticking noise in her head moments before the car goes up. The Box Elder Journal put her photograph on page one that Thursday under the headline “Actress Steals Show During Visit Monday,” reported that she would be seen on The Untouchables that same evening, and noted an upcoming Tony Curtis and Dean Martin comedy it called “Who’s That Lady?” — released that April as Who Was That Lady?, with Lansing in the cast. A columnist at the rival Box Elder News had the busier day. He had spent part of it photographing Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, then campaigning for the presidency on a two-day swing through Utah, when word reached the office that a television actress was at the Tropical. He said he would send a photographer right up — “The photographer was me,” he admitted later. She posed for a couple of pictures, he reported, answered some questions, and could not have been nicer about any of it.

In 1961 the Nuttalls announced that they were changing the restaurant’s signs to give the place “a more modern appearance.” A photograph taken the year before shows what came down: a tall neon pylon spelling “Tropical” vertically in all caps above a painted palm, with “Smorgasbord” and “Buffet,” also in all caps, running across the marquee below.

The daily rhythm by then began before daylight. When crews arrived to raise the microwave relay towers on the mountain above town, Morris let them into the dark restaurant early, cooked their breakfasts, and packed lunches for them to carry up. Then he went back to his pies and cinnamon rolls.

The ground, however, was shifting underneath the address. Interstate 15 had been under construction north of Brigham City since November 1959, and the segments from Brigham City to Honeyville and on to Elwood opened in 1966, with the link from Elwood to Tremonton awarded in the fall of 1967; the connection south toward Ogden would not be let until May 1970. For a Main Street restaurant, that sequence meant that northbound and Idaho-bound through traffic began peeling away from Main Street several years before the southern leg of the bypass was even under contract. More immediately, Thiokol’s budget was cut and its workforce reduced in 1967, a shock that sent the mayor of Brigham City out hunting for other industry. For a house with 300 seats and a banquet room for 200 to fill, that was the more pressing arithmetic.

The end came the following year. In May 1968 the local newspaper reported that Ted Barnes had leased 128 South Main, “formerly operated as the Tropical restaurant,” intending to turn it into a family recreation center with four coin-operated pool tables and two ping-pong tables. Later that year, on July 28, the Sunday business pages of the Salt Lake Tribune published a large display ad announcing a bankruptcy auction at the Tropical Restaurant, listed with Morris Nuttall’s name. The sale was set for Tuesday, July 30, at ten o’clock sharp, with inspection on Monday, ten to four. No limit, no reserve, terms cash. “One of Utah’s finest restaurants,” the auctioneer’s copy read. “Be sure to attend this Sale.”

The partial list ran the length of the column. The heated and refrigerated smorgasbord counter. Eight aquariums — the four that had faced the sidewalk and the four set deeper in, still there, still counted. Booths, tables, counter stools, carpeting, paintings, a mirror, the awning. A ten-ton General Electric air conditioner and a five-ton Capitolaire. A Melville Clark upright piano. A charcoal broiler with hood, a double-door walk-in cooler, a Litton microwave oven, a meat block and cleaver. Then the small things: honey dispensers, roll baskets, bus trays, oval plates, and the assorted cans of foodstuffs and spices left in the storeroom. The sale was authorized by the U.S. District Court under Bankruptcy No. 164-68, Bruce Jenkins sitting as referee, John Allen as trustee, and Harry Margulies of Salt Lake City taking the bids.

Morris Nuttall left Utah. In California he went to work for Kentucky Fried Chicken and became, by his family’s account, a personal friend of Colonel Harland Sanders — an odd but fitting second act, though less of a departure than it looks: He had been selling franchised fried chicken on Main Street since the 1950s, under a different name. By the same account he had known big-name fighters as well: Jack Dempsey, Rocky Marciano, Max and Buddy Baer. He died in 1987 in Everett, Washington, at age 78, and was brought home to the Brigham City Cemetery.

Keith followed the same trade in the same direction. He went from the Tropical Restaurant into the same company his father had joined, managing Kentucky Fried Chicken stores in Long Beach and eventually holding franchises of his own in Arizona and California in partnership with Brent Ross. He and Colleen Petersen raised 11 children. He fished Logan Canyon, hunted, and had a habit his family remembered fondly: after locking up the restaurant at night he would load everyone into the car and drive to Ogden to bowl. He died in 2012 in Orem, Utah, at age 81, survived by 39 grandchildren and 52 great-grandchildren, and his obituary signed off with four words a boxing family would choose: “We’ll miss you, champ.”

Maddox Ranch House is still selling fried chicken in Perry, four generations on. The building at 128 South Main is gone; the ground it stood on, on the west side of Main between First and Second South, is now a supermarket parking lot. What is left of the Tropical Restaurant is scattered — matchbook covers; postcards of the interior, one of the banquet room laid out for a party under the mural, one of a booth beside a lit aquarium; and a salvaged booth itself, reupholstered and carried up to somebody’s cabin. And at the Brigham City Cemetery, where Keith Jesse Nuttall lies in plot B-59-6-4, immediately beside his father in B-59-6-3.

August 25, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Rogers/ Arkansas

Hotel Arkansas French Dressing

The Orchard

Hotel Arkansas

121 West Poplar Street
Rogers, Arkansas

1940 – 1963

In the summer of 1928, S. A. “Gus” Lane of Little Rock began putting up a five-story hotel at the corner of West Poplar and Second Streets in Rogers, Arkansas, a Benton County town of a few thousand people whose money still came out of apple orchards, poultry houses, and the Frisco line. Rogers wanted the hotel enough to buy it a site: the Rogers Community Club acquired the corner lot, worth $10,000, and gave it to Lane as an inducement to build there. Ground was broken on July 16. Lane was a former district superintendent for the Southwestern Bell Telephone Company who had crossed into the hotel business as the proprietor of the Gleason and Terminal hotels in Little Rock. To design the hotel in Rogers, he hired John Parks Almand, a Little Rock architect then in the middle of a 50-year practice, who gave him something Arkansas had almost none of: a full-dress Spanish Colonial Revival building. The building went up in yellow-buff brick beneath a low hipped roof of red Spanish tile, with the guest floors lifted a full story above the sidewalk so that a row of rentable storefronts could occupy the ground level facing Poplar Street. A broad flight of limestone steps climbed from the street to a nine-bay arcade of glazed terra-cotta archwork carried on slender limestone columns, and a narrow square brick tower, recessed in vertical panels of pale glazed terra cotta and capped with a pyramidal roof and small finials, rose above the cornice to fix the center of an otherwise symmetrical facade.

The arcade set an 18-foot ceiling height that ran straight through the public rooms inside — lobby, ballroom, lounges — spanned by exposed redwood beams carved and stenciled in color, with wrought-iron sconces and light fixtures, red tile floors, and colored tile worked into trowel-patterned plaster. There were 72 single rooms on the three upper floors, half of them with baths, and the two wings were framed so that the hotel could be enlarged to 152 rooms if the traffic ever justified it. Part of the second story over the shops was given over to a terrace, raised about ten feet above the sidewalk in front of the entrance facade. The building had a 160-foot frontage on each street, cost about $200,000, and when it was finished no commercial building in north Arkansas was taller or covered more ground. The location was chosen with the same care as the elevations: The hotel sat between the bus station on Second Street and the railroad depot on First, close enough to both that a traveler could walk to either with a grip in each hand. In September, with the walls up to the second story, Lane incorporated the Lane Hotel Company to own and operate the place, taking the presidency himself and putting his brother J. L. Lane in as vice president and treasurer. The company was capitalized at $2,000. The building it existed to hold was to cost a hundred times that, and the difference was raised in mortgage bonds, an arrangement that worked precisely as long as the bonds could be serviced.

It opened in 1929 as the Lane Hotel, with another of the brothers, Lander A. Lane, installed as its manager. The Great Depression arrived immediately behind it. The hotel called itself the “Palace of the Ozarks” in its own advertising, and the state’s application to add the building to the National Register of Historic Places would later describe it, accurately enough, as “the most elegant hostelry in north Arkansas.” Elegance, however, was the wrong product for 1930. People with money for a fancy hotel room stopped having money for a fancy hotel room, and the litigation that would eventually consume the building began within a few months of the opening.

On April 1, 1932, the Lane Hotel Company failed to make a bond payment of $7,300. Three weeks later a chancellor in Fayetteville put the company into receivership on a petition from creditors that included the county tax collector, the county clerk, and a St. Louis stationery house, and named a Little Rock insurance man, Elmo E. Walker, as receiver, with instructions to keep the hotel running. It was widely expected that a good summer season would clear the arrears. That August, three months into receivership, Lane was advertising in the Arkansas Gazette over his own name as president, and the advertisement is the best surviving portrait of what he had built and what he thought it was for: the Palace of the Ozarks in the center of the resort region, large, modern, fireproof, five hours from Little Rock on paved and scenic road, with open-air dinner-dances every night on the terrace to Johnny McGuire’s University of Missouri orchestra, dinner a dollar, no cover charge, dancing free. Rates had not been raised for the resort season; they had been cut, to $1.50 for a single room. It was not enough. In October 1933 the company filed a voluntary petition in bankruptcy, and the schedules Lane filed listed assets of $234,440 against liabilities of $221,446, nearly all of it secured. On March 14, 1935, the hotel was sold at auction for $61,650 to a Pine Bluff attorney bidding for the first-mortgage bondholders. The only other bidder in the room was a baker in Rogers named Earl Harris.

Two blocks away, another business had been going in the other direction. Earl A. Harris and his sister Effie had started the Harris Bakery at 107 West Walnut in 1926. Harris had quit school after the eighth grade to support his mother and six older siblings, and he had found the one product that sold better in a depression than out of it. Harris was turning out bread at a dime a loaf and trucking it to grocery stores across Northwest Arkansas, on the plain arithmetic that buying a loaf had become cheaper than baking one. Losing the auction did not settle the matter. The bondholders had bought the hotel to protect their claims, not to run it, and said as much: the committee would operate the place temporarily until a sale could be arranged. The sale it arranged was to Harris, for $100,000, half what the building had cost to put up seven years earlier, and he renamed it the Harris Hotel. In 1936 he put up a new bakery immediately north of it, advertised without visible embarrassment as the most beautiful bakery in America. The two buildings were joined at the rear, and Harris ran steam off the hotel’s heating plant to heat the bakery’s ovens — a piece of thrift that tells you most of what you need to know about how he operated.

What Harris bought was a building; what he made was an institution. The room off the lobby to the right became the town’s ballroom — hosting dances, balls, and wedding receptions — and the bands that played there drew people from all over Rogers, including a good many who had not been invited and simply sat on the curb outside to listen. To the left of the lobby was a shop selling newspapers and sundries, with a shoeshine stand; farther west, a room large enough for piano recitals. Traveling salesmen worked out of the place. So did tourists coming down for the Ozark Playgrounds season, and college football teams in the state to play the Razorbacks. Harris moved in himself; when he married Helen Bialock Anderson of Little Rock in December 1937, the Gazette recorded that the couple were at home in the Harris hotel. The names of the hotel’s most famous guests — Amelia Earhart, Jack Dempsey, Errol Flynn, Henry Fonda — have been repeated in Rogers for three generations, and are mostly beyond checking. One endorsement is on the record. Henry Miller came through Arkansas in 1940 and 1941 gathering the material for his travel book The Air-Conditioned Nightmare, and he called the place one of the best and most reasonable hotels in the whole United States.

There was one problem Harris inherited. The hotel had never lacked food service; the original plans put a dining room on the second floor beside the lobby, there was a coffee shop, and under Lane the terrace had run dinner-dances nightly. What it lacked was a room built to be a restaurant. Meals ended up in the big ballroom at the front of the building, which worked for a banquet and not much else. On January 3, 1940, crews began clearing the garden on the north side of the hotel for the foundation of a $25,000 annex. It was two-thirds up by the middle of May and finished that year: a Spanish-type structure, semicircular at the protruding end and built, as the Gazette put it, on extreme Spanish lines, with the restaurant on the second floor and a beauty parlor on the level below. Harris told the paper it would be one of the most modern restaurants in the Central Southwest. The detailing matched the interiors Almand had designed eleven years earlier — the same beams, the same plaster, the same iron. They called it the Orchard, a name that took its cue from the apple country the hotel’s guests had driven through to get there. The restaurant occupied the upper level and an outside staircase dropped from the dining room down to what was left of the garden. The beauty parlor underneath became, at some point before 1943, the quarters of the hotel’s manager. Diners sat at round wooden tables under chandeliers that had been designed to double as ceiling fans, which in an Arkansas August was not a decorative flourish. The kitchen would in time be run by Russell M. Roderick, whom the Ozark tourist guides billed simply as the “famous Chef Roderick” and whose roquefort dressing, mixed a gallon and a half at a time, was still being printed under his name two decades later.

Three years after adding the restaurant, Harris sold the hotel. The deal was announced at noon on a Saturday in January 1943; the buyer was R. D. Goff, the founder of a Fayetteville-based string of grocery stores across Northwest Arkansas, and the Fort Smith Southwest American reckoned it the largest real estate transaction in Rogers in the eight years since Harris had bought the place himself. Harris kept the bakery and a stock farm north of town and said he would give his whole time to the two of them. Goff held the hotel for six months. He had taken it through a new company, the Arkansas Hotel Company, and in July 1943 he sold his entire stock in it to the three men who sat on the board with him, Claude Duty, Warren Felker, and W. R. Vaughan, all of Rogers, acting for the rest of the stockholders. Management went to Irene Sparger of Oklahoma City, lately of Rogers, who had been assistant manager since January and now took the whole of it. Forrest Calvin had the job for most of the 15 years that followed, and his daughter Kay grew up in the building. The family apartment had no kitchen, which meant that every meal the Calvins ate for 15 years came out of the Orchard’s kitchen upstairs. Kay Calvin also left the best description anyone has of what the room was for. The Orchard was where the business of Rogers got done: judges, attorneys, physicians, store owners and managers, real estate men and insurance agents all turned up there at some point in the day, so that a stranger could learn more about the town at one table by the window than in a week of calls.

By 1948 Felker had emerged as the principal among the Rogers men, and he would run the hotel through the corporation until the day it closed. The building’s civic role did not change with the ownership. In June 1949 the Rogers Chamber of Commerce staged an Ozarks Golden Wedding Jubilee there, honoring couples married 50 years or longer. The Chamber said 126 couples had registered from all parts of the country, and on June 16 nearly 100 of them, with better than 5,000 years of marriage between them, assembled on the hotel’s limestone steps for a mass ceremony to reaffirm their vows. The photograph that survives is one of the more remarkable crowd pictures ever taken in Benton County.

In 1952 the Northwest Arkansas Times ran a short notice out of Rogers reporting that the Harris Hotel would carry a new name after that month: the Hotel Arkansas. The name was not new to the people who owned it. They had been the Arkansas Hotel Company since Goff organized it in 1943, and the building had taken nine years to catch up with the letterhead.

Through the 1950s the hotel stayed busy and the ballroom stayed booked. Teenagers in Rogers went to Pep Club dances and to the Blue Demon Ball under the high ceilings and the chandeliers, and enough of them have written about it since that the memory of the room outlasted the room’s working life by half a century.

Both of the men who had made the building died as it went into its last years. Lane went first. In the early hours of a Friday morning in March 1958, the two-story brick house he lived in two miles west of Russellville burned to the ground while he was in Georgia visiting relatives. His wife, Grace, was alone in it; a caretaker living 50 yards off woke at half past four to the barking of dogs, saw the big house in flames, and was driven back by the heat. She was 56. Lane died in September, in a Russellville hospital after a long illness, at age 78. He had bought the telephone exchange at Russellville in 1929, the year the hotel opened, and over the three decades that followed he built it into the Western Arkansas Telephone Company, serving 16 towns along the Arkansas River Valley. Earl Harris died in 1959.

But the ground was shifting under the whole downtown-hotel business, and Rogers is a nearly perfect specimen of how it happened. In September 1961 the Sands opened at 208 South Eighth Street — 24 units with air conditioning, television, a swimming pool, and a restaurant, and free parking at the door. It was the first modern motel in Rogers, and among its managers was Forrest Calvin, the man who had run the Harris Hotel for 15 years. Two years later the Town and Country Motor Lodge opened on Highway 71 South; the Jan-Lin Motor Inn followed in March 1964, and a Holiday Inn arrived in 1966 with a 70-foot Razorback laid out in gravel on the roof. Every one of them was on the highway, and every one of them had a parking lot. The Hotel Arkansas had limestone steps and a bus station.

The end came in the summer of 1963. Felker, as the president of the Hotel Arkansas Corporation, announced on July 9 that the hotel would close the following Monday and that the 75-room establishment would be “boarded up and sold.” It had not been operating at a profit for some years, he said, and the closing was a matter of economic necessity. Edgar Barnes, the last manager, closed the doors on July 15. The Gazette, writing the building off, described it as a showplace that had been beset by financial difficulties since its completion in 1929. The Northwest Arkansas Times called it the latest crisis in a rocky 34-year history — a fair summary of a building that had been in financial trouble before its first guests checked out.

The building sat boarded up for four and a half years. It was bought at the end of 1967 from the Felker estate by Defenders of the Christian Faith, Inc., a nonsectarian religious organization founded at Wichita in the mid-1920s by the fundamentalist publisher Gerald B. Winrod, a defendant in the 1944 mass sedition prosecution in Washington that collapsed into a mistrial when the judge died and was dismissed thereafter. Winrod had been dead a decade; the Defenders were now run out of Kansas City by Hart Armstrong, who announced that the Rogers landmark would become a retirement hotel on the model of the organization’s 13-story Townhouse in Kansas City, itself a converted hotel, the old La Salle. The Defenders took possession on January 31, 1968. Armstrong said the 70 rooms were in excellent shape and would rent for something between $75 and $150 a month, meals available.

Joe and Dera Keen took over in 1977 and ran the building as the Rogers Townhouse. At the end of the 1990s the building became Peachtree at the Lane (borrowing half its name from the hotel of 1929), an assisted living facility run by Dr. Annette Landrum’s Fort Smith–based Peachtree Village company. In August 2001 the home cleared out the accumulated inventory of three hotels to make room for a residents’ recreation room, in a two-day sale it called “All through the Ages.” Out of the basement and the closets came white permanent-wave rods and a 30-pound iron from the beauty salon, orange dining chairs from the 1920s, oil paintings, wooden writing desks, a three-foot silver coffee urn, roughly 1,500 books, and a Taylor & Farley pump organ.

The facility closed in October 2003, and the building went on the market and stayed there. When the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette looked at downtown Rogers in April 2004, the five-story former hotel on Poplar Street was the largest of the empty buildings, and the merchants who remained were worried less about paint colors than about demolition. The city was creating a historic district commission to compete for preservation grants and keep buildings standing; Bill Watkins, an attorney and the chairman of Main Street Rogers, made the case for it in four words: “But property changes hands.” The former Hotel Arkansas had changed hands eight times by then and had been dark for a year. It changed hands once more that year. Raymond Eshaghoff, a New York developer and co-owner of the real estate investment firm Ninety-Second L.P., bought it for a little under $1.3 million in 2004 from Lexington Retirement Properties of Fort Smith and announced a $3 million renovation that would make it a high-end building of restaurant, apartments, offices, and shops. Nothing, however, was built. Three years later he flew back in from New York with a consultant from a global hotel firm to work out what the building could be used for at all, the earlier plans having failed, as he put it, to make economic sense. The consultant put the count at 52 rooms and two elevators in 40,000 square feet. “This is a trophy building,” Eshaghoff said.

It stayed dark for more than a decade. In June 2015 KLS Leasing, a Delaware company affiliated with the Walton Family Foundation, bought the building for $1.6 million from Eshaghoff’s group, which had been trying to sell it since 2009, and spent two years on a restoration that put new classrooms behind the original walls while returning the second-floor lobby to its 1929 condition — brick floor, stenciled redwood beams, iron fixtures. Haas Hall Academy opened its Rogers campus there in 2017. It moved to a larger site off Interstate 49 in the summer of 2024, and the School for Advanced Studies–Northwest Arkansas opened in the building that fall. Almand’s semicircular dining wing still projects from the north facade, its Spanish detailing intact.

August 20, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Alexandria/ Virginia

Spoon Bread

Collingwood-on-the-Potomac

8301 East Boulevard Drive
Alexandria, Virginia

1932 – 1975

The carpenters came in 1932, and when they left the farmhouse on the bluff in Alexandria, Virginia, was no longer a farmhouse. Two two-story wings had been grafted onto a plain seven-room dwelling — a building the surveys describe inconsistently, as two stories in one account and a story and a half in another — and a colonnaded portico had been thrown across the front, aimed at a bend of the Potomac River and, beyond it, the Maryland shore. Nearly 40 years later, surveyors for the Historic American Buildings Survey looked at the result and could barely find a date to hang on it. “The original house was built about 1785 and probably served as an overseer’s house,” their 1970 report concluded — a date later research would dispute — before noting that the building had not reached its present size until the 1932 expansion. That single season of construction turned a working farm dwelling into what looked, to anyone driving south from Alexandria, like an antebellum plantation house — which was precisely the point.

The woman behind the work was Natalie Yates. Her husband, Mark Reid Yates, had bought the property in 1922 from Clayton Emig, who had bought it from LeRoy Delaney, who had bought it in 1894. The Yateses promptly sold off the acreage west of what would become the George Washington Memorial Parkway to residential developers, leaving the house sitting on a handsome but shrinking remnant of riverfront. What remained was a view, a spring, and a name with a long pedigree. Natalie Yates decided to trade on all three, remodeling the house as a Colonial Revival and opening it as a tearoom.

The timing was not accidental. The Mount Vernon Memorial Highway opened in 1932, built by the federal government for the bicentennial of George Washington’s birth, and it delivered automobile traffic past the front door in volumes the old Washington, Alexandria & Mount Vernon Electric Railway had never managed. A property that had spent 70 years as a dairy farm suddenly sat on a scenic parkway between Alexandria and Mount Vernon, at the exact midpoint of a drive that thousands of Washingtonians now took on Sunday afternoons.

The land underneath had been changing hands since the 17th century. Giles Brent laid claim to a large tract on the Virginia side of the river between Alexandria and Occoquan in the 1650s; on his death it passed to his cousin George Brent, and in 1739 to William Clifton, whose holding of roughly 1,800 acres was known as Clifton’s Neck. In 1760, having married the widow Martha Dandridge Custis the year before, George Washington bought Clifton’s land after negotiations that ran from February to May and involved the General Court of Chancery at Alexandria and the Privy Council. The tract became River Farm, the northernmost of the five farms of his Mount Vernon estate. A small house is believed to have gone up on the site around 1785 for Washington’s overseer, Sam Johnson, who ran the farm, operated a ferry across the Potomac, and collected fees from vessels drawing water at the spring; for a time the place was known as Johnson’s Spring and Johnson’s Ferry. The ground between the house and the river acquired a reputation as a dueling field, Marylanders having crossed the river to settle quarrels their own colony frowned upon. Washington’s secretary Tobias Lear held a life tenancy in the land and lived there until his death in 1816, and it is from Lear that the name most likely descends: During his years as consul general in Algiers he was associated with Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood, Admiral Lord Nelson’s second-in-command at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

After Washington’s death the property passed to his nephew’s descendants, George Fayette Washington and Charles Augustine Washington, who sold it off in pieces. In 1852 Henry Allen Taylor, a young Alexandria lawyer turned farmer, bought the site and either built the house that became Collingwood or substantially enlarged something already standing there. Taylor died in 1856, and the following March his brother and John Augustine Washington III of Mount Vernon advertised the place for sale in the Alexandria Gazette. In 1859 a 652-acre slice of the old River Farm went to three Quaker brothers from Mullica Hill, New Jersey — Stacey, Isaac, and William Snowden — who had come south to demonstrate that a Virginia farm could pay without enslaved labor. Isaac took Wellington; Stacey and his wife, Sarah, took Collingwood and ran it as a dairy. Stacey Snowden represented the Mount Vernon district on the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors from 1883 to 1885, and when the electric railway came through in the early 1890s, one of the stops carried the family’s name.

None of which would have mattered much to a tearoom in 1932 except as marketing, and Natalie Yates used all of it. By the spring of 1933 the Collingwood Tea House was already a fixture on the Washington society pages. On a March morning that year she gave a breakfast there for the German ambassador, Friedrich von Prittwitz und Gaffron, and his wife. In April, Mrs. Owen J. Roberts, wife of the Supreme Court justice, held a luncheon at Collingwood for a visitor from Philadelphia. That June, a Washington man named Edmund Brewer Montgomery gave his bachelor’s dinner there on the Thursday before his wedding — the bride was Natalie Yates herself, who was attended by her six-year-old daughter Nancy while her sons Mark Reid Yates, Jr., and John Sellers Yates held the ribbons for the bridal party. In September, Senator Alben W. Barkley of Kentucky and his wife hosted a dinner at the Collingwood Inn for their visiting daughter. In December the Washington alumnae of Beta Sigma Omicron marked their sorority’s founding with a dinner there, and Mrs. Edmund Brewer Montgomery — as she now signed herself — gave a luncheon for 35 in honor of a visitor from Vienna.

The formula held through the decade. The rooms were leased out for bridge parties and house-guest dinners; the kitchen turned out food that the newspapers, and the management, called Southern. An advertisement in November 1938 offered Thanksgiving dinner at $1.75, served from noon to 8:30, under a small line drawing of the columned facade and the promise of a house “Overlooking the Potomac.”

The fullest contemporary portrait came a year later, in the Washington Post’s weekly “Serve It Forth” column, which still called the place the Collingwood Tea House. The column explained the name — Admiral Collingwood, described as “the real hero of the Battle of Trafalgar” — and repeated the local tradition that English captains sailing from Alexandria in colonial times had anchored offshore to replenish their water casks from the spring, and that the same Johnson spring water, so called by Washington himself, was still poured for guests. It reported that Mrs. Montgomery was then living in Mexico, where her husband was serving in the foreign service, and that a manager named Ben Wade, Jr., had run the dining room since its establishment in 1932. It noted that Collingwood stayed open all year except from December 1 to March 1.

The neighborhood actually contained two Collingwoods. “Little Collingwood on the Potomac” was the adjacent estate of Colonel Robert Davis, retired, where his daughter Elizabeth Gould Davis was married in August 1934. By the late 1950s Little Collingwood was the Montgomerys’ own home, and in June 1958 nearly 400 guests came through its terraced gardens to mark the couple’s 25th wedding anniversary, filling a 40-foot living room with a fireplace at either end. The restaurant was the larger house up the road.

The war interrupted everything. With Washington’s population swelling and hotel rooms impossible to find, the building was pressed into service as housing for airline crews. In 1944 the U.S. Army took it over and ran a school for military intelligence on the grounds. According to a history compiled by the museum that later occupied the property, a good deal of the propaganda material aimed at Japanese forces was produced there under Army supervision. The mansion’s wartime record has attracted more legend than documentation. It sits a short drive from Fort Hunt, the interrogation center known to its personnel only as P.O. Box 1142, where some 3,400 high-value German prisoners were questioned between 1942 and 1945, and stories that German prisoners were also handled at Collingwood have circulated locally for decades without ever being pinned down. A 1976 real estate column would go further still and describe the property as a wartime OSS training center, which appears to be a garbled memory of the intelligence school rather than a separate fact.

Collingwood reopened after the war as a restaurant, and by 1950 it was running at full steam. An advertisement that April invited readers to take the drive down the Mount Vernon Highway to “Collingwood-on-the-Potomac,” promised Charleston pecan pie, Virginia ham, and spoonbread, listed luncheon from noon to 3:30 and dinner from 6 to 8:30, advertised a “Fashions-at-Luncheon” event for April 11, and mentioned overnight accommodations. A display advertisement in the Washington Evening Star that May put it more grandly: “An Open and Generous Hospitality Awaits You at Collingwood,” it read, on George Washington’s River Farm, five miles south of Alexandria.

That same advertisement carried a second line at the bottom: Collingwood Theater on the Potomac. The newly formed company opened on May 30, 1950, in a 400-seat house operated in conjunction with the inn, with a summer season promising French Without Tears, Yes, My Darling Daughter, Papa Is All, and Strictly Dishonorable. The producing group signed as director Steve Zacharias, who had staged Equity Library Theatre productions in New York City. In early July the company took on Sidney Howard’s They Knew What They Wanted, with Eugene Marlo as the aging Napa Valley vintner bewildered by his much younger wife and Fran Benton and Lee Bergere heading the support, while The Two Mrs. Carrolls closed out its run; the Post described the venue as an “open-to-the-skies theater” off the Mount Vernon Highway and noted that the company played nightly except Mondays. Bergere, then in his early thirties and still a decade from Hollywood, would spend the 1960s and 1970s as one of American television’s most recognizable character actors and end up, in 1981, as the majordomo Joseph Anders on the television series Dynasty.

The proprietor himself was drafted into the company. In July 1950, a Post columnist reported that Edmund B. Montgomery, formerly of the foreign service and now the owner of the Collingwood Inn, would appear with the Collingwood Players in Heaven Can Wait. His first question on being offered the role, the item noted, was “How big is the part?”

Through the 1950s the house settled into the rhythm of a country inn with a seasonal clientele. In 1951 a national magazine published by the Ford Motor Company described it as a country inn in an old Southern mansion on former Washington land, serving lunch and dinner every day but Monday, with rooms upstairs, and open only between mid-March and Thanksgiving. An Evening Star advertisement in March 1955 announced that Collingwood-on-the-Potomac was open for the season, with fried chicken, Smithfield ham, the house spoon bread, and fresh pecan pie, closed Mondays. At some point in these years the restaurant earned a recommendation from Duncan Hines, whose approval was the closest thing mid-century American road dining had to a star rating, and which the Post was still citing 30 years later.

The management changed hands more than once. From 1960 to 1963 the manager was Patricia R. Cummings, wife of an Air Force colonel, who had followed her husband to postings in the Philippines and Japan and who took the job during a Washington assignment. By October 1964 the manager was a man named Harl Outman, and it was Outman who found the night watchman. The restaurant closed Mondays, but Outman had driven over that afternoon to bring in some umbrellas left outside, and shortly after one o’clock he discovered James Williams, 50 years old, who lived in a basement room on the premises, handcuffed to a radiator. Two men had woken Williams at gunpoint the previous evening, marched him upstairs and chained him there, then went at the top of the safe with tools they found in Outman’s own kit. Workmen arriving to fix a water leak frightened them off before they got it open; they left with $15 from a cash drawer and a wallet holding $93. The Mount Vernon Rescue Squad sawed Williams free after four hours.

In 1968 the property was sold to Daniel Cohen and William Eacho. Cohen was a Brooklyn native who had managed a produce business in New York before the war, led a tank destroyer battalion in the European theater, and come home with a Bronze Star. He had been managing partner of Fan & Bill’s, a well-known Washington restaurant, until it closed in 1962, and had run the Fire Fountain Inn at the Sheraton-Silver Spring in the mid-1960s; he would finish his career as food and beverage manager at the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, retiring in 1978. Collingwood on the Potomac was the restaurant he ran in between.

It did not last long. The restaurant’s last service came in 1975. A real estate column in the Washington Post of April 24, 1976, described the place in the past tense: until recently a restaurant, now eight acres of waterfront on the former River Farm, listed at $395,000 by Mount Vernon Realty, whose president was W. Howard Rooks. The column conceded that the building “needs some gussying up,” noted that the property retained two banquet rooms and four working fireplaces, and pointed out — in what reads today as a warning shot — that the property’s residential zoning left room for house lots without disturbing the restaurant’s special-use status.

What happened instead was stranger and, for a while, better. At about the same time, a retired Army brigadier general named Archibald W. Lyon and several fellow retired officers had begun looking for a home for a museum devoted to what they called Americanism. They had concluded that Washington’s great institutions, for all their holdings, expressed nothing of the sentiment they wanted expressed. A boarded-up mansion on Washington’s own River Farm, less than four miles from Mount Vernon, struck them as the right address. A foundation was incorporated in 1976, and on March 31, 1977, the sale closed: $395,000, paid by the foundation for a National Library and Museum on Americanism, headed by Colonel LaVon P. Linn, whose principals were affiliated with National Sojourners, Inc., an organization of active and retired commissioned officers who were also Master Masons. The purchasers announced that they would repair the property extensively and keep the acreage intact, and — unlike most buyers of large riverfront parcels in Fairfax County in 1977 — they meant it.

The restoration produced the building most people now remember. The first floor held a small library in a room with 13-foot ceilings and crystal chandeliers, the collection spilling into the hallway; an adjacent room housed the 19,000-volume Library of American Civilization on microfilm, purchased with a $25,000 grant from IBM. Upstairs were Native American artifacts, including a seven-foot Sioux chief’s headdress a century old, and one of 500 silver-and-gold facsimiles of the 1215 Magna Carta cast, the Post reported, by the Library of London. Miniature flags of the 50 states hung above the entry archway; a portrait of Washington after William Joseph Williams’s 1794 painting hung over a mantel; three poles out front flew the American, National Sojourners, and Bennington colors, floodlit through the night. A portfolio on a table recorded the weddings held on the lawn.

Not everyone was impressed. When the Post visited in May 1984, several museum professionals in Washington said they had never heard of the place; Margaret B. Klapthor, curator emeritus in political history at the National Museum of American History after 40 years there, said she had not known such a thing existed, and an official who declined to be named called it “an embarrassment,” faulting it for holding nothing of note. Lyon was unbothered. The museum, he said, existed to say what was right about America rather than what was wrong with it, and to that end Collingwood staged Constitution Day each September with speeches and patriotic songs drawn from different eras, and on June 2 and 3, 1984, was to host members of the 1st Virginia Regiment, who would camp on the grounds and march in tricorne hats to show visitors what campaign life had been like.

The house also became, for the first time in its history, the subject of sustained research. Peter W. Pedrotti, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who served as curator, spent years assembling a history of the property; a condensation of it, published under the title The Collingwood Story, ran through the ferry operators, the farmers, the airline crews, the intelligence students, and what it called “one of the better area restaurants.” Some of what Pedrotti gathered is documented and some is folklore — the account has Jim Bowie killing a man in a duel on the grounds over a slur about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, an episode that appears in no reliable record and that would place Bowie in Fairfax County at a time he is not known to have been there. The value of the document is less as a chronicle than as evidence of how Collingwood understood itself.

The arithmetic eventually caught up with the foundation. An events building called the American Legacy Center was put up to generate revenue, and the mansion was rented out for weddings, birthdays, reunions, and corporate retreats, but the debt grew faster than the bookings. In July 2012 the foundation listed the property through TTR Sotheby’s International Realty for $5.9 million. Paul A. Frank, its executive director, called the decision heart-wrenching, said the Sojourners’ supporters had 35 years of attachment to the place, and reduced the sales pitch to a sentence: “George Washington walked here.” He held out hope that a developer might build around the mansion, or that a buyer might keep it whole, and said that if a major donor appeared the foundation would take the property off the market. No donor appeared.

The museum wound up its operations, and the property sold in 2015 for $2.6 million to Tyler Murrell, a son in the family that owns the Five Guys hamburger chain. What followed was the sequence the 1976 real estate column had foreseen. In December 2018, Anne Stuntz, chair of the Fairfax County History Commission, wrote to Mount Vernon District Supervisor Daniel Storck arguing that the site held archaeological potential relating both to the house and its outbuildings and to Native American occupation, and that surveys had already produced artifacts. A demolition permit application was filed in June 2019. Fairfax County granted it on July 1, along with a permit for a new single-family house.

Collingwood was listed on the Fairfax County Inventory of Historic Sites, which turned out to mean nothing. “This designation is honorific only,” Brian Worthy, a county public information officer, explained, adding that it did not prevent an owner from tearing a building down. The county could ask the owner to photograph the house before it came down, and he did. Elizabeth Crowell of the Fairfax County Park Authority noted that there were two archaeological sites on the property and said that the demolition would not disturb them. Storck said that once Collingwood was gone it could not be recovered, and that he wished the owner could build what he wanted while acknowledging the house’s role in shaping the community. Tammy Mannarino, a local historian who had spent years untangling the building’s construction sequence, made the case that its accretions were the point: “It’s a house that evolved to meet the needs of this community,” she said, adding that if it had to come down she hoped an expert would be present to read the structure one last time.

The mansion came down, apparently around the turn of 2019 into 2020 — the demolition permit ran through the end of 2019 — and by the spring of 2021 a large new house stood on the hilltop. The architect who designed it kept an oval window in the portico and four columns across the front, a gesture toward what had been there. The construction permit Fairfax County issued alongside the demolition order describes the rest: a single-family luxury house with an elevator, a wet bar, balconies, a three-car garage and, out on the lawn where the Sojourners had flown three floodlit flags, a detached pool house. Ken Lopez, who grew up three doors down on East Boulevard Drive and had watched the neighboring Andalusia mansion blown up in his childhood, called the loss gut-wrenching and allowed that the replacement was, architecturally, a fine homage.

The county’s own numbers had said plainly enough what was going to happen. In the 2019 tax year Fairfax County assessed the land at $3.055 million and the building standing on it at $203,690 — the house that had served Southern-style meals to senators, ambassadors, and Sunday drivers across more than 40 years was worth less than seven cents on the dollar against the ground beneath it.

August 18, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Arlington/ Virginia

Chicken Curry

The Little Tea House

1301 South Arlington Ridge Road
Arlington, Virginia

1920 – 1963

In 1838 an Irish immigrant named Philip Roach bought a stretch of high ground above Alexandria, Virginia, for his family, and when he died soon after, the property passed to his son James, a contractor who had made money supplying brick and stone for the Aqueduct Bridge, the Alexandria Canal, and the Alexandria, Loudoun & Hampshire Railroad. In 1841 James Roach built a Federal-style mansion on the crest and called it Prospect Hill. From its windows the family looked across the Potomac River at a capital city still under construction.

The war took the hill away from them. Virginians voted for secession on May 23, 1861, and at dawn the next morning federal troops crossed the river to seize Arlington Heights. Union engineers threw up Fort Albany on Prospect Hill to command the approach to the Long Bridge by way of the Columbia Turnpike. The fort was an earthwork with a perimeter of 429 yards and emplacements for a dozen guns. Soldiers cut the Roach timber for clear fields of fire, ate the livestock, and camped on the surrounding acreage, including the patch of ground where, 60 years later, a small frame building would go up. The Roaches emerged from the war impoverished and sold the property. By 1920 the land had passed into the undeveloped holdings of Philip Campbell.

Gertrude Lynde Crocker came to that parcel by way of a jail cell. She was born in Milwaukee in 1884 to Eliza Warner Lynde and John Tweedy Crocker and raised in Hinsdale, Illinois, where her father worked as a purchasing agent for the Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railroad. She enrolled at Vassar, her mother’s college, in 1903, left after two years, and finished at the University of Chicago with a bachelor of science in mathematics in 1911. In 1914 she and her older sister Ruth sailed for Europe; the war caught them in Austria and sent them home early. Within months Gertrude was in Washington, D.C., working out of the headquarters of the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage, the militant organization founded in 1913 by Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, learning the mechanics of congressional procedure, marching in poster brigades, and hawking copies of the organization’s weekly paper on the street.

She rose fast. By the fall of 1915 the Washington Evening Star, tallying up the largest force of suffragists ever gathered in the capital for a demonstration set for December 6 to 13, listed “Miss Gertrude Crocker of Illinois, who is acting as headquarters secretary” among the leaders already on the ground. She served as a marshal in the opening march to the Capitol and the White House. By February 1916 she was the Congressional Union’s assistant treasurer, tracking memberships and donations and wiring money to organizers in the field; when the Union merged into the National Woman’s Party the following year, she became its treasurer.

The publicity stunts of that period have a strange sweetness to them now. On May 5, 1916, the Evening Star reported that a dozen suffragists had descended on Statuary Hall to hand Representative William Elza Williams of Illinois a Susan B. Anthony birthday cake bearing 59 unlit tapers, one for each of his years. Two young women from his home state carried it in on a stretcher improvised from an American flag and a suffrage banner: Ruth and Gertrude Crocker. It happened to be Ruth’s birthday too. Written across the icing in the colors of the wisteria bloom was the wish that the coming year would bring Williams joy and the Susan B. Anthony amendment. He thanked them heartily. Representative William Kent of California, acting as the Union’s aide-de-camp, had lured him out of the House chamber without telling him why.

Eighteen months later the tone had changed entirely. Crocker was among the 12 women — the “Silent Sentinels,” as they were called — who stood at the White House gates on January 10, 1917, in the first picket line of the campaign. On October 22, 1917, the Evening Star ran the arrests on its front page: Alice Paul and Dr. Caroline E. Spencer to six months in the Occoquan Workhouse, “and Gladis B. H. Greiner and Gertrude L. Crocker to 30 days each in default of a fine of $25 each.” The pickets announced they had no intention of paying. Crocker served three sentences in all and went on hunger strike during each of them. In a letter smuggled out of the Washington Asylum and Jail (commonly known as the District Jail) in November 1917, she told her mother that she felt like “a rat in a trap,” locked up “merely for holding a banner in front of the White House.” After a six-day hunger strike following her arrest in August 1918, party accounts described her as among the most severely ill of the prisoners; a photograph shows her being helped out of a taxicab at headquarters, barely able to walk to the door. She received one of the silver prison-door pins the party awarded its jailed members that December. In January 1919 she was arrested again for burning the text of Woodrow Wilson’s speeches on European freedom in a watchfire outside the White House.

The 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified on August 18, 1920. By then Crocker was already in business. Alexandria County had been renamed Arlington earlier that year, and the little frame building on the ridge went up during the changeover. It opened on Tuesday, June 1, 1920, under cool and cloudy skies, with Gertrude and Ruth Crocker as its proprietors.

Gertrude’s account of how it began, given to the Washington Post in 1934, has the flatness of someone describing arithmetic. A friend had told her the way to build a business was to “find a need and fill it.” She noticed there were almost no tea houses near Alexandria, so she found a site and hired an architect to put up a little house. At the start there were a handful of rooms and no more than six tables. She wanted to be independent and answer to no one; she also, by a later telling, needed the money.

It was, at first, literally a tea house. The pivot to a full menu arrived by accident, in the form of a telephone call requesting a chicken luncheon for two. Crocker accepted the reservation and only then confronted the fact that she had never fried a chicken and, in her words, “didn’t know what to do.” A neighbor kept poultry. She hurried over, bought two birds, and paid extra to have them plucked and cleaned. Then she stalled out on an instruction that the tendons be drawn from the legs, until a second neighbor assured her the chickens were young enough that it made no difference. She cooked the lunch with a cookbook propped open beside her. Fried chicken stayed on the menu as a house specialty for the next 40 years.

From there the place grew addition by addition, without a master plan. Hams, steaks, Virginia skirt steak, and lobster joined the chicken. By the early 1930s the operation ran to four buildings, seven dining rooms, and six open porches, several of which were eventually glassed in. Annual business was running around $120,000. The most sought-after of the rooms was the Washington View Room, an enclosed sunporch built over what had been an open brick patio; it looked out over beds planted deliberately to draw butterflies and hummingbirds, and past them to the whole panorama of the nation’s capital and the Virginia lowlands. Real-estate advertisements in the Washington newspapers had begun using the restaurant as a survey marker; one 1934 notice located a subdivision about half a mile south of the Little Tea House and expected readers to know exactly where that was.

The feature nobody forgot was the tower. A round fieldstone well house with a conical roof, it looked like a fragment of a small castle that had wandered onto the property and settled in. Ellen Puterbaugh, the daughter Gertrude and Ruth adopted, remembered decades later only that her mother had worked with an architect whose surname she believed was Deming — almost certainly William I. Deming, a Washington native and 1894 graduate of Columbian University, later George Washington University, who built revival-style houses around the District of Columbia and specialized in restoration work. The Tea House put the tower on the back of its menus and in its newspaper advertising because no competitor had anything like it.

Behind the dining rooms was a household. Crocker kept enlarging the residence she called Gray Gables until it reached nine bedrooms and five baths, with a basement apartment lit by a skylight built in from below grade on the east side. Her daughter’s room was a sleeping porch. A converted garage on the grounds became a one-bedroom cottage with a pine-paneled living room and a fireplace, rented to a woman named Mary Backer; a woman named Ethel Greenburg lived in the tower for years and paid $40 a month for it. That two unmarried women had adopted a child at all was, in the 1920s, close to unheard of, and Puterbaugh recalled that the arrangement always required explaining. Neither of them seems to have minded much. Ruth, who had put in the early years beside her sister, eventually moved to Boston, where she died in 1932; Gertrude ran the place alone for the 14 years that followed. A 1947 profile put it that Crocker stood five foot two and had the nerve of a six-footer.

Puterbaugh’s own memories were of an oddly bucolic childhood in the middle of a commercial enterprise. She rode her pony to sixth grade at the Hume School a few hundred yards down Arlington Ridge Road and turned it loose afterward to walk home, where the chauffeur-gardener put it back in its paddock. Her mother did not drive. She worked from eight in the morning until the dining room stopped taking orders at eight at night, then planned menus and kept the books. “She was a workaholic in the true sense,” her daughter wrote, and “an incredibly smart business woman.”

What turned the well house into an institution was courtship. The upper deck of the tower proved irresistible to couples, some of whom refused even a single candle so as not to compete with the moon. Crocker, who watched this from the kitchen door, observed dryly that she did not see how they managed to eat, though she supposed it hardly mattered. When the first newlyweds asked to rent the tower for their honeymoon they had to cross the lawn to another building to bathe; they extended a one-night stay to four anyway. Crocker took the hint and put in a bath and a small kitchen. The Post was writing about honeymooning couples gravitating to the Tea House by June 1934. Novelists noticed too: Nancy Hoyt used the restaurant as a setting in Roundabout (1926), and in Edwin Bateman Morris’s The Silk Coquette, published the same year by Penn Publishing, lovers meet there to say goodbye.

The clientele that made the place famous arrived on official Washington’s schedule. Florence Harding entertained the Cabinet wives at tea there. Grace Coolidge and Eleanor Roosevelt both dined, the latter sometimes with Elinor Morgenthau. Oliver Wendell Holmes came from the Supreme Court for dinner and the view. Diplomats and ambassadors used the quieter rooms for conversations they did not want overheard downtown. Amelia Earhart would come up directly from Hoover Airport on the flats below — the airfield later buried under the Pentagon — to argue for an enlarged and improved airport for Washington. Crocker also said, in a 1936 deposition, that Woodrow Wilson had stopped in for tea during one of his automobile rides through the countryside. A local columnist eventually wrote that more consequential business was settled over the tables of the Little Tea House than in the official halls of the capital, which was nonsense, and which everybody repeated.

A single evening from the restaurant’s fifth year shows what kind of establishment it really was. On Friday, April 24, 1925, a group called the Little Club Around the Corner gave a dinner at the Little Tea House in honor of Harriet Taylor Upton, the veteran Ohio suffragist. The guest list, printed in the Evening Star two days later, amounted to a directory of the women then running the federal government’s work on women and children: Grace Abbott, chief of the U.S. Children’s Bureau; Julia Lathrop, her predecessor there, representing the National League of Women Voters; Mary Anderson and Agnes Peterson of the Labor Department’s Women’s Bureau; Lucile Atcherson, the first woman admitted to the American diplomatic service, from the State Department; Mina Van Winkle, who ran the Metropolitan Police Department’s women’s bureau; Ethel Smith of the National Women’s Trade Union League; Selma Borchardt of the American Federation of Teachers; and the superintendents of nurses for the Navy, the War Department, the Veterans’ Bureau, and the Public Health Service. Six years past her last arrest, Crocker had built the room where that network ate.

One decision mattered more than any of those guest lists. The Little Tea House seated racially mixed parties at a time when both Virginia and the District of Columbia were segregated by law and by custom, and it did so decades before the county’s lunch counters gave way. Arlington’s businesses did not desegregate until 1960, after a series of sit-ins in the Cherrydale neighborhood. Crocker and her sister had been on the wrong side of a jailer’s baton for a principle; they appear to have found this one uncomplicated.

Crocker was not a proprietor who stayed behind the register, either. When the Auth Provision Company proposed to put up a $200,000 slaughterhouse on the north side of Columbia Pike, near the Highway Bridge and not far from the planned approaches to the new Memorial Bridge, she went after it. The Evening Star of February 20, 1927, reported that the National Capital Park and Planning Commission had declined to censure the project, and identified Crocker, a member of the Arlington County Chamber of Commerce, as one of the leading canvassers against it; she had already worked her way through a list of state and federal officials looking for a way to stop it. “It is impossible to build an abattoir that will not be offensive,” she told the newspaper, running down the odor of scalded animals, the railroad sidings, the cattle cars, the pens of herded hogs and sheep. It was an outrage, she said, that Arlington should become the slaughter ground for industries Washington itself did not want. John Auth, an official of the company, had assured the same reporter that the plant would be a modern two-story structure with sanitary pens, that there would be “absolutely no odors,” and that nobody would know the hogs were there except for hearing their squeals now and then.

By 1930 the restaurant was substantial enough to be written up in The Book of Washington, the Board of Trade’s promotional volume, with photographs of the building and the garden. Six years later Crocker was in court. At age 52 she sued for her share of her late father’s estate and won, after a judge found she had reached what the papers called an age of prudency — she had, after all, built a tearoom business then valued at roughly $100,000. The Chicago Tribune covered it under a headline calling her the tea hostess of presidents.

The war years gave the dining rooms their strangest amenity. From 1941 to 1943, guests on the porches watched the Pentagon rise out of the mudflats directly below them — five concentric rings of concrete going up where the Hoover airfield had been. Rationing thinned the menu, but the restaurant’s own gardens supplied greens and herbs that needed no coupons, and eating out remained one of the few available escapes from the pressure of a capital at war. Washington had always fled uphill in summer — to Kalorama, to the Maryland heights, to Arlington Ridge — and the Tea House had been trading on that instinct since before air conditioning was a consideration.

Crocker retired in 1946, at age 62, and took the presidency of the Arlington Soroptimist Club, a service organization for professional women of which she was a charter member. She leased the restaurant to Gertrude Allison, a native of Johnson City, Tennessee, and a 1927 graduate of Carson-Newman College who had gone to Johns Hopkins to study dietetics. She had meant to teach home economics, and said she got into the food business by accident: three of her Hopkins classmates turned up as dietitians at the Oriole Cafeteria in Baltimore and talked her into joining them. A few years later, at a restaurant convention, she met the Washington cafeteria operator Evan Sholl, who offered her a job. She stayed with him for twelve years, taking time out at intervals to finish a master’s in institutional management at Columbia, and during the war produced a cookbook for the merchant marine at the War Shipping Administration. Allison put her own name on the door. From 1946 on the place was Allison’s Little Tea House.

The souvenir postcard from those years is a good short course in what she was selling: brass and copper antiques, shelves of rare old cookbooks, a tinkling Swiss music box, and an establishment devoted, as the caption had it, for the past quarter of a century to the art of gracious eating. A menu dated September 3, 1947, shows what the kitchen actually put out. Fried chicken and fresh lobster held their places. So did a mixed green salad made with herbs from the garden. Wine and champagne were available; beer and hard liquor were not. The dessert list ran to a deep-dish cherry cobbler, strawberry shortcake, and the coconut cream pie that became the restaurant’s most durable legacy, outliving the building by decades in cookbooks and clippings. The menu closed with a toast lifted from Macbeth, wishing good digestion on appetite and good health on both, with William Shakespeare’s name misspelled. An advertisement from January 1950 supplies the arithmetic: roast prime ribs of beef, with two vegetables, salad, hot bread, beverage, and dessert, for $2.50.

Allison kept studying. She took classes in New York with the English chef Dione Lucas, whom she judged “adept but not very precise,” and in 1952 she went to Paris and enrolled in Le Cordon Bleu, where she met Julia Child. By her own account she became one of the first three private students in the lessons Child was then giving in her own kitchen on the Rue de l’Université, with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle — the school the three of them called L’École des Trois Gourmandes. Child devoted most of a page of My Life in France to her: an early student, enthusiastic and hardworking, with a background in home economics at Columbia and “a sound business sense.” Child recorded the particulars of the Arlington operation as Allison described them — an inn that fed Pentagon officers at lunch and family groups in the evening, with dinner running $1.75 to $3.50. When Child pressed her on the economics, Allison passed along the rule that a restaurateur should not pay more than six percent of gross receipts in rent. That same year, 1952, Crocker sold her the business outright.

She talked about that apprenticeship for the rest of her life. “We combed the markets together and prowled the hotel suppliers’ places for equipment,” she told an interviewer in 1970, calling it a wonderful opportunity. She rated Child “wonderful” as a cook and “fantastic” as a person, and her favorite story was of an evening when a dish they meant to flambé for guests would not light — nothing, she said, could bother Julia. The cookbook that would make Child famous was still only a dream.

Allison’s ambitions had outgrown Arlington Ridge. In 1954 she bought the Olney Inn in Montgomery County, Maryland, founded in the mid-1920s by Clara May Downey and known for house-cured hams and produce from its own grounds. She married Kingman Brewster, becoming Gertrude Allison Brewster, and was widowed when he died in October 1957. She joined the board of the national restaurant association in 1956, and by the end of 1958 she was the first woman president of the 700-member Washington Restaurant Association — cutting the ribbon that December on a regional convention of 5,000 delegates at the Sheraton-Park Hotel, where she served as official hostess. She had just learned that Life magazine had named the Olney Inn one of the 40 outstanding country dining inns in the United States.

She let the Little Tea House go in 1956 to concentrate on Olney. On January 27, 1957, Mr. and Mrs. Etienne Weber — formerly of the Graystone Restaurant in Washington — took out an advertisement in the Evening Star announcing that they had bought Allison’s Little Tea House, and the name reverted to what it had been for its first 26 years. Within a few years the property changed hands again, to Mr. and Mrs. John Digenis, whose names appear on the last generation of postcards.

The place still worked. A postcard mailed on July 8, 1959, and now in the collection of the Arlington Historical Society, reports the garden as so cool and tranquil that the writer had settled in beside one of the petunia beds. A woman who had gone there as a high-school student in the 1950s remembered joining her mother and her mother’s colleagues from the Pentagon for spring and summer lunches, learning the word smorgasbord at the terrace layout, and then carrying plates to the tables — “blue skies, white fluffy clouds, birds singing,” as she described the setting more than half a century later. It had the feel of a private house, she wrote, except that it was always overflowing with people.

What killed it was arithmetic no different from the kind Crocker had once done in her head. The same qualities that drew the Crocker sisters to Arlington Ridge in 1920 — elevation, quiet, an unobstructed view, land nobody else wanted — drew apartment developers to it 40 years later. The River House complex to the east had already clipped part of the panorama. In late 1958 the Robert Towers, a pair of seven-story buildings, opened directly across South Arlington Ridge Road. The rural retreat was hemmed in, and the ground under it was worth more empty than full.

The restaurant was still working the season when its fate was settled. On May 31, 1963, an advertisement in the Evening Star billed it as a historic landmark with superb cuisine, taking reservations at OTis 4-7900, offering accommodations for private parties, and noting that it was closed Mondays. Six nights later the Arlington County Board took up the question of what would stand in its place.

John Digenis, the owner, had asked for the zoning to build a 12-story apartment house called the Ridge House, with the Little Tea House reconstructed on the top floor and its antiques moved into the new restaurant and the lobby. Apartment construction closer to the Potomac had already taken the view, his spokesman, H. C. John Russell, told the board, and the only way to restore it was to go up. The building would cost $2.5 million and carry three levels of underground parking; the architect, W. L. Mayne, had drawn 38 efficiency apartments, 79 one-bedrooms, and a three-bedroom penthouse. The board was unmoved. Chairman Thomas Richards said the project would create definite traffic problems and moved to deny it, and Roye Lowry, seconding, called it a violation of the county’s master plan. The planning director, Richard Arms, had already filed the more wounding objection: Nothing put before his office showed how the charm, intimacy, and character of the existing Tea House could be carried up to the 12th floor of an apartment building, and a restaurant with that view would be well patronized wherever it was put.

The warning nobody acted on came from Eleanor Lee Templeman, a local historian who would write the restaurant’s elegy 11 years later. The land was already zoned for apartments, she pointed out, and under that existing classification the Digenises could build without asking the county for anything — a building that would necessarily cover the maximum ground area and take the trees and the garden setting with it. The beauty and atmosphere of a tangible Arlington County cultural asset, she said, would be lost to all people, forever. That is precisely what happened. The application was denied, and the owners built by right instead: nine stories, 89 units, no restaurant on the roof. Every structure on the property except the tower came down. On June 24, 1964, the Northern Virginia Sun recorded the transfer of 1.6657 acres of the old Campbell tract from John Digenis and his wife to a partnership of the Digenises with Donald F. and Clarence C. Simpson, styled The Ridge House; county inventories date the development to 1964, and the building was converted to condominiums in 1979. Prospect Hill, James Roach’s mansion next door, was demolished in 1965.

Crocker outlived her restaurant by six years. She had fallen out with the National Woman’s Party in 1947, after helping convene a rump convention of members unhappy with Alice Paul’s tactics on the Equal Rights Amendment, and her involvement there tapered off; she stayed active in the League of Women Voters, Arlingtonians for a Better County, and the Arlington Civic Federation. She never married. She died in 1969 in Fairfax, Virginia, at age 85. Her name is inscribed today on the Turning Point Suffragist Memorial in Lorton, a few miles down the road from the workhouse where she was once held. Gertrude Allison Brewster ran the Olney Inn until about 1966 and did not much mourn the sale; things had changed over the years, she said afterward, and she had found it hard to get and keep help who cared. “There’s money to be made in the restaurant business, and then there’s a certain feeling of accomplishment,” she told an interviewer in 1970. “But there are very few people who would want to work as hard as I worked.” She retired to Asheville, North Carolina, where two of her sisters lived. The Olney Inn burned to the ground in 1978 while its then-owner was negotiating its sale to a developer.

In July 2000, the Arlington Historical Society received a letter from Rustburg, Virginia. Ellen C. Puterbaugh had one question. Was the tower still standing, or had it gone the way of the two residences and the Tea House? She had hundreds of photographs, she wrote, going back to when Arlington Ridge Road was dirt. Told that the tower survived, she mailed the society four dozen postal views of the property and a second letter. “I lived in a world of beauty,” she wrote of the grounds she grew up on. “Progress destroys so many lovely things.”

The tower is still there, at the point where South Lynn Street breaks off from South Arlington Ridge Road. It holds equipment and supplies for the condominium swimming pool. A parking lot covers the rose beds and the butterfly garden. Pedestrians on their way down the hill to the shopping mall at Pentagon City pass a round fieldstone building with a conical roof and no explanation attached to it, and the county’s photographic record of what stood behind it — Collection PG 215 at the Charlie Clark Center for Local History at the Arlington Public Library, most of it from the first five years — sits a few miles away in a climate-controlled research room.

August 17, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Fripp Island/ South Carolina

Pineapple Jubilee

La Tai Inn

201 Tarpon Boulevard
Fripp Island, South Carolina

1967 – 1971

Back in the early 1960s, Jack Kilgore wanted to build a marina on Fripp Island, South Carolina. There was, however, a problem: Before anything could be built on the low, sandy ground behind the beach on the island, the ground had to be raised. And so Kilgore hired Bob Sutton, a Georgia man who had spent years as superintendent and engineer for a large Great Lakes dredging company, and set him to a job with two objectives: deepen the tidal creek behind the site so that boats could tie up there, and use the spoil to lift the building pad. A pipe was laid across Tarpon Boulevard and dredged sand ran through it onto the lot. The second objective was met handsomely. The first was not. Even after considerable dredging, the water behind the property remained too shallow at low tide to float a marina. Kilgore had his elevation. He didn’t have his boat basin.

He had, by then, most of the other pieces. Kilgore had first seen Fripp Island in March 1960 — roughly 3,500 acres in all, held by the 16 shareholders of the Fripp Island Corporation, all of them men who used it as a hunting and fishing retreat. He was 33 years old, with three small sons and a fourth on the way, six years out of a New York finance house and three more selling equipment in Columbia, South Carolina. He and his wife, Anna Jean, put in their $10,000 in savings, and he went looking for people to match it. At first only two would. “They were the only ones who didn’t think I was crazy,” he told the historian Page Putnam Miller years later. Fourteen more eventually came around. That September the shareholders agreed to sell out and took a deposit, and on November 10, in Beaufort, Kilgore — as the president of the newly formed First Security Investment Corporation — handed Joab M. Dowling a check that closed the cash end of a price reported at more than half a million dollars, the balance secured by a mortgage. A photographer for the Beaufort Gazette captured the moment: Dowling taking the check, the Columbia attorney W. Ray Berry and the stockbroker Roy A. Krell looking on.

Krell’s job was to raise the money for what came next. That October the Gazette gave over a full page to First Security Investment Corporation — a map of the island platted into lots and loops of road, thumbnail biographies of the officers and directors, and an offering of 250,000 shares of common stock at $1.10, sold through Krell’s brokerage on Bull Street in Columbia. The page ran under a headline announcing a multimillion-dollar resort center abuilding.

What the shares were meant to build was published alongside them, and it was not modest: a yacht and beach club, marinas, a golf course, shopping centers, an airport, and — promised in the earliest press releases — complete restaurant facilities and a seaside motel. The planners had a particular spot in mind for the club. At one point along the beachfront a deep salt creek swung to within about 800 feet of the ocean, so that docks and surf could be had a few minutes’ walk apart. That is where the La Tai Inn would eventually stand, and that is the creek Bob Sutton would be sent to deepen.

By May 1961, with bulldozers working sunup to sundown and the only approach still by boat, Fripp Island Resort, Incorporated, was advertising in Columbia for the island’s “first families” — 121 lots in three subdivisions, and the promise of “a fine quality motel” to come. The bridge across Fripp Inlet, 300 yards of water between Fripp and Hunting Island, opened in 1963. The first oceanfront lot sold that year for $2,500, and a golf course designed by George Cobb followed in 1964.

Six years on, what the island still lacked was the bed and the table it had been promising all along. Kilgore knew it and couldn’t pay for it, so he did again what he had done to buy the island in the first place: he found partners. Ten investors joined him in a separate company, Resort Lodging Incorporated, to which he promised the land outright if they would build and operate an inn on it. Among them were Ray Berry — the same Columbia lawyer who had stood by while Kilgore handed over the check in 1960 — along with Van Newman and Bill Turbeville, fraternity brothers of Kilgore’s at the University of South Carolina and by then the builders of many of the earliest houses on Fripp Island. Kilgore became the new company’s president, and the boards of the resort and the inn overlapped substantially.

Construction began in 1967 on a million-dollar motor inn with 60 guest rooms. What rose on Sutton’s fill was not a Lowcountry building at all. The roof was shingled and sloping, the walls a pale yellow, the trim a hard orange, the whole profile borrowed from the South Pacific. At the entrance stood a tall orange sign carrying the resort’s early emblem, a man paddling an outrigger canoe. Inside, a chandelier hung over the lobby and a curved staircase climbed to a cocktail lounge with a long view down the beach. The decorating ran to tapa-cloth hangings, carved masks, models of old sailing vessels, and tiki lanterns.

Kilgore named it the La Tai Inn. The words meant “sand and sea” in Polynesian, he said. The name came with a logotype — the two words set on either side of that same paddler — that the resort advertised as its exotic new symbol.

The inn opened without ceremony. On November 16, 1967, the Beaufort Gazette carried two full pages on the La Tai: one headed “We’re still planting grass . . .” over a photograph of the finished building, the other a block of congratulations from the Beaufort firms that had worked on it — the concrete plant, the plumber, the electrician, the roofer, the tile company, the glass company, the pool builder, the bank. The inn was already open for business, the notice said, with 60 rooms, a convention hall, a restaurant and a coffee shop, and a license from the State ABC Board. No formal grand opening would be held until January. Until then the La Tai would simply go on taking guests, and Beaufort residents in particular were invited to drive out and test the food and the entertainment. Anyone coming to eat would not be charged the usual dollar toll to cross the Fripp Island Bridge.

The general manager, William F. Ross, said he had imported one of the “finest food teams” available anywhere. His head chef was Pierre Rosier, a Frenchman who had come to Fripp by way of the Bahamas, where he had been executive chef at the Lucayan Beach Hotel. The maître d’hôtel was Cornelius Pynacker, a native of Rotterdam. A local seafood man, Jim Chaffin, was brought in to work a Lowcountry accent into the continental menu.

By the last day of December a feature on the new kitchen was running in South Carolina newspapers, and Rosier was already exasperated with the American dining public. Americans rushed their meals, he complained; they were intimidated by menus; they had no appetite for anything unfamiliar. He intended to correct all three at Fripp. “The American must slow down and take at least an hour to enjoy any meal,” he said. “He must ask about things on the menu he does not understand.” And, he added, he must get out of the shrimp-cocktail-steak-salad-baked-potato habit.

The raw material was not the problem. “With all of the fresh vegetables and meats available, plus the wonderful seafood at our back door,” he said, “the eating pleasure in South Carolina is virtually untapped.” What American kitchens did to it was another matter. Americans and the English overcooked everything, and they cooked too far ahead. “On the continent and now here at Fripp we cook everything at the minute it is served, not a week before.”

An elegant meal takes time, Rosier said; people ought to plan an evening around a meal rather than fit a meal into an evening. Asked to lay out his own ideal one at the La Tai, he began with a white wine and a seafood cocktail — lobster, shrimp and crabmeat, all of it local — bound in a sauce of chopped celery and chives. Then turtle soup with a touch of sherry, though not, he was careful to say, from the loggerheads nesting on the beach outside: those were native to the island, and “we do not serve our own as they are pets.” His pièce de résistance was tournedos Rossini — tenderloin cooked with goose liver in a Madeira sauce — with sautéed potatoes and a bouquetière of young carrots, turnips, tomatoes, peas, and green beans. “And a nice burgundy.” After that a cheese and celery tray, an assortment of pastries, crêpes suzette, chocolate mousse. “Finish it with a nice cup of coffee and, perhaps by then, a nice nap or rest.”

Asked what he cooked when he cooked for himself, Rosier turned reluctant. “I really hate to say,” he admitted, “but my favorite is a baked potato with two pats of butter, a piece of French toast, and a glass of ginger ale on the rocks.” The service was meant to match the kitchen. The inn imported a staff from the Bahamas and trained it in the continental style, and by the end of 1967 was promoting itself as able to seat luncheons, banquets, and conventions of up to 200.

The formal opening slipped past January and came on March 15, 1968 — four months after the first guests had checked in — and was staged as a weekend rather than a ribbon-cutting. An equestrian team performed. The Marine Corps sport parachute club dropped in. Tahitian dancers danced, a swing band played, Polynesian dishes came out of Rosier’s kitchen, champagne was poured, and at midnight there was a lingerie fashion show. Sixty units were ready for guests; a riding stable and a tennis court were still under construction. A swimming pool sat inside a patio of palms, and a lawn ran out to the foot of the dunes.

Twelve days earlier Dorothy Knox, a travel columnist for the Charlotte Observer, had turned up on what she called a flying trip, made on her way home from Hilton Head because a friend had told her one of the best chefs on the Eastern Seaboard was down there. Ross gave Knox what she described as the briefest interview on record, walked her through the 60 units and the convention space, introduced her to Rosier, and told her that 62 houses stood on the island with 10 more going up. In-season rates ran $36 single and $42 double for an oceanfront room, $32 and $38 for what the rate card still called a marina view (the water Sutton had dredged); breakfast and dinner were included and the greens fee was $5. The $1.75 lunch special the day she passed through was soup, curried shrimp, rice, green beans and pie à la mode. She regretted not staying for it.

Then the ordinary business of the place began, which turned out to be the interesting part. The dining room served three meals a day. Rosier, in whites, supervised the cooking himself, and the dish people remembered was his oyster pie. On weekends the restaurant and its dance floor went formal — women in long dresses, men in suits and sometimes tuxedos, swing music, and a crowd that included a number of Fripp’s early residents who read Vogue and Women’s Wear Daily and dressed accordingly. For gentlemen who turned up without a coat or tie, the inn kept a supply on hand.

Upstairs, the lounge ran live music. Among the performers was Billie Mustin, a pianist and singer who had worked in Columbia and New York City and whose sister, Helen Fant, owned a house on the island. Fant later recalled a night when Mustin was playing to a full room and someone shouted that a loggerhead was up on the beach laying eggs. The room emptied. It was, Mustin observed, the first time she had ever been upstaged by a turtle.

Behind the scenes the operation was substantial for an island that size. In the busy months the inn employed around 80 people across the front desk, kitchen, dining room, and housekeeping. It started a children’s program its first summer and ran a stable so guests could go horseback riding.

The advertising leaned on the same fantasy as the architecture. Fripp promised oyster roasts beside the Atlantic, horseback rides on moonlit trails, and golf on an oceanside championship course, all of it available in what the copy called the Wonderful World of Fripp. Off-season, the inn sold what it billed as Indian Summer magic, with package rates that included breakfast and dinner. By 1969 the listings described a dining room open daily for all three meals, overnight accommodations, and tennis, riding, four-season golf, fresh- and saltwater fishing, and swimming.

Rosier did not stay long. By his own later account he spent about a year on Fripp before moving to California to learn more about American cooking. In the summer of 1971 he was chef at the Inn of the Six Flags in Arlington, Texas, building buffets for a new dinner theater. He surfaced again in Columbia, first running the restaurant at Coldstream Country Club and then, in 1975, opening his own place: Tivoli Scandia, a French and Scandinavian restaurant on the ground floor of the Middleborough Apartments on St. Julian Place, where his wife baked the pastries and the beef Wellington went for $10. He still wanted his customers to linger — two hours, three hours, he told a reporter that spring. It had been eight years since he had said the same thing about a dining room on a barrier island.

Back on the island, confidence peaked in 1970. That year the resort announced a $4 million expansion, most of it condominiums, but with the inn at its center. The La Tai, then 60 units with meeting space for 150, was to be doubled: 60 more guest rooms, convention facilities for 500, and a new dining room seating 225. Forty condominium units would go up in the first phase, some beside the inn and facing the ocean, the rest arranged around a marina proposed for the water in front of it.

Very little of that happened. The convention business the plan was built on never materialized in the volume its authors expected. In 1971 the Polynesian conceit was quietly dropped, with the La Tai Inn becoming the Fripp Island Inn. Meanwhile the island’s underlying problem came due. Fripp had been developed on individual septic tanks, with a community sewer system always promised for later, and by 1972 the South Carolina State Board of Health was seeking an injunction to halt further development until a wastewater plan was approved. That same year Kilgore sold his interest in the resort for $3.5 million and moved back to Columbia. The buyers were a group of savings and loan institutions; John Hardin, an early Fripp homeowner, was a key figure in the purchase. The new owners built the treatment plant.

They also changed course. Presenting their master plan, the new management said its priorities were preserving the island’s ecology and maintaining a tranquil, family-oriented atmosphere — and concluded that the inn, which had drawn only limited convention traffic, did not fit either one. Their solution was to take it apart. The sleeping rooms would be converted into efficiency-suite condominiums and sold off. The restaurant and bar — by then operating simply as part of the Fripp Island Inn — would become the beach club. The promotional literature drew the line plainly: Fripp Island was not a commercial resort spa but a private, full-serviced residential community. “Full-serviced” meant appearance, maintained recreation, and guards on the bridge, and it went a long way toward quieting the friction that had built up between residents and the resort’s owners. Families, not conventions.

The pieces are still there, still doing the jobs they were assigned in the 1970s. The old guest rooms survive as the Sun Suites — studio efficiencies of roughly 325 square feet with kitchenettes, clustered beside the Olympic-size pool, and still the cheapest way to buy into Fripp Island. The restaurant Rosier opened went on serving dinner for another half-century under a plainer name: the Beach Club.

Kilgore lived to see what the island became. He was back for Fripp’s 50th anniversary in 2010, by which time it held some 2,300 homes and condominiums, two golf courses, six restaurants, five gift shops, and a racquet club. “I wanted a low-density, non-commercialized island,” he told the Beaufort Gazette that year. “I would have never dreamed Fripp would have that number of houses today.” He died at home in Columbia in 2015 at age 88.

In 2023 the resort that Kilgore built changed hands for the seventh time since the bridge opened, with Seascape Hospitality Group, the new owner, promising to renovate nearly everything on the island. Out in front of the old inn, the loggerheads that Rosier refused to put in his soup still come ashore every summer. And the creek that runs behind it is still too shallow at low tide.

August 16, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Colorado Springs/ Colorado

Poached Colorado Rainbow Trout in Court Bouillon

Indian Grill

27 East Pikes Peak Avenue
Colorado Springs, Colorado

1932 – 1962

In 1912 James Ferguson “Jimmie” Burns, the Cripple Creek gold millionaire, opened an opera house at 21-23 East Pikes Peak Avenue, a three-story pile of glazed white terra cotta designed by the architects Douglas and Hetherington, with Italian marble floors, cherubs painted on the ceiling, and balconies that swept across the room without a single obstructing pillar. Burns had been a plumber before he was a mining king, and he never entirely forgave Colorado Springs society for its airs; he once remarked that it took more brains to fix a toilet “than to speak bad French.” His theater seated roughly 1,500, and the ground floor of the building carried shops and offices facing the avenue. By 1927 the opera house had been converted to a movie theater. By 1933 it was operating as the Chief Theatre, its neoclassical front interrupted by a neon marquee that later critics would call, depending on temperament, graceless or monstrous. It was in the Burns Building’s own row of storefronts, at No. 27, that a restaurant called the Indian Grill opened in 1932.

Its proprietor was Joseph E. Besseghini, born in 1893, who ran the place with his wife, Rose Biondini Besseghini. They were an Italian family in a town whose civic self-image ran heavily to Anglophile gentility and Pikes Peak scenery, and the restaurant Besseghini built split the difference between the two in a way that now seems almost audacious. The name and the decor were frontier Western. The kitchen, from the beginning, was substantially Italian.

What visitors remembered was the walls. Besseghini collected Native American artifacts, and the pieces that filled the dining room had reportedly been gathered in the surrounding country rather than bought as stage dressing from a catalog. Baskets, beadwork, weapons, pottery, and paintings accumulated over three decades until the restaurant functioned as a small unaccredited museum where the exhibits happened to have tables underneath them. There was a bar off the dining room called the Papoose. The Indian Grill served lunch and dinner every day but Tuesday, and it did not take itself so seriously that it required reservations.

The thing that carried the restaurant’s name beyond El Paso County, though, was a bottle of salad dressing. By the late 1930s Besseghini was mixing an Italian-style dressing in the restaurant kitchen and selling it over the counter. Advertisements from 1939 announced it plainly enough — “Delicious and Different” — and priced a bottle at 25 cents. The federal trademark file for the Indian Grill brand of salad dressings would later fix the first use of the mark at January 1, 1938. The mark itself was registered in 1940, and not to the restaurant: the registrant was Besseghini, trading as the Indian Grill Products Company, a separate name for a side of the business that had already outgrown the kitchen from which it came. The label carried a full-face Indian head, a scatter of arrows, and a broken circle, a design the U.S. Patent Office would eventually index in the dry taxonomy of its own classification scheme. Some newspaper ads for the salad dressing reproduced the emblem — a war-bonneted chief between the words “Indian” and “Grill,” both in all caps, with an arrow running the width of the ad beneath him — and underneath the line “Made by the Indian Grill, Colorado Springs, Colo.” By 1941 the dressing had escaped the dining room entirely and was stocked in groceries in Colorado, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, and Wyoming — even as far away as Ohio.

It traveled by the ordinary machinery of prewar food promotion. One such ad, published in 1940 by a newspaper in Casper, Wyoming, borrowed an endorsement from Dorothy Ayers Loudon, a nationally known home economist who conducted a cooking school for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and boasted that the dressing was on its way to being the best-selling one in the state — a claim presumably drafted for Colorado readers and then sent north with the rest of the copy. In August 1941 the food columnist Dorothea Hake of the Cincinnati Enquirer made it the lead item in her “News About Food” column, describing an Italian-style dressing of oil, vinegar, and spices meant primarily for greens, noting that vacationers and travelers had been enjoying it for years at the Indian Grill in Colorado Springs, and cautioning readers that garlic was among the flavorings — if that made a difference to them, she wrote, they would not want it on their next green salad. It came in half-pint and pint bottles, and readers who wanted to know where to buy it were told to telephone the newspaper’s food service department. The same month a Corpus Christi grocery advertised eight ounces for 22 cents beneath a headline recommending it “for your wop salad.” The phrase is jarring now and was not then. From the 1930s into the 1980s it was a standing menu heading for a garlicky Italian green salad across Louisiana, Texas, and the Gulf Coast, most closely identified with New Orleans and printed by Italian-American restaurateurs about as readily as by anyone else — a slur worn so smooth by use that most of the people setting it in type appear to have stopped hearing it. It ran that August above a product invented by a Colorado Springs restaurateur named Besseghini.

The Indian Grill salad dressing had escaped the dining room; now it escaped Besseghini, and that is where the story turns. In 1944, according to a complaint filed 16 years later, he released the formula to Castlegate, Inc., a Colorado-chartered food processor that sold products across an 11-state northwestern territory under the brand name Bluhill, under an exclusive royalty agreement — the arrangement that a small proprietor with a good product and no bottling plant would naturally make. The following year he sold the restaurant itself to Paul M. Borchert, a former manager of the Broadmoor hotel, and stepped back from the business he had founded while continuing to collect on the dressing that bore its name. Borchert was Dutch, and had been in the papers himself in September 1940, when word reached him at the Broadmoor that his brother John and his niece Pauline had been killed in one of the first German bombing raids on Holland.

Borchert kept the name, the relics, and the reputation. Meanwhile the dressing moved further away from the man who invented it. On August 4, 1947, an application was filed to register “Indian Grill” as a trademark for salad dressings; the registration issued on June 6, 1950, as No. 525,859, superseding the 1940 registration, No. 374,731. The applicant of record was Bluhill Foods, Inc., of Denver. That 1950 date matters, because the complaint of 1960 would allege that Castlegate registered the dressing in its own name that year while continuing to pay Besseghini his royalties. By then the bottles carried the Bluhill imprint — Castlegate’s own brand rather than a stranger’s, the two names describing one enterprise — and the copy had acquired the mildly confounding jauntiness of postwar grocery advertising: “Try Dressing MEN like!” The reach went upmarket as well as down. In 1948 the dressing was advertised in Gourmet magazine, aimed at a readership nobody was courting with 22-cent grocery specials — a recipe out of a Pikes Peak Avenue kitchen presented to the carriage trade.

The restaurant, for its part, was having a good decade. In March 1954 Ford Times, the monthly travel magazine published by the Ford Motor Company, included the Indian Grill in one of its standing features — about the closest thing a regional restaurant then had to a national credential. A photograph taken in 1956 from an upper window across the Pikes Peak Avenue captures the whole block in one frame: the Chief Theatre’s marquee advertising the motion picture “Attack” with Jack Palance, the Medical Arts Pharmacy, the Out West building, and the Indian Grill’s own sign, all crowded together on a downtown street that was still, in 1956, downtown.

It had also acquired a standing noon congregation. The Rock Pile — an unofficial lunch club of Colorado Springs business and professional people, named, one longtime member supposed, for the rocks its members threw at one another and at everybody else — had been meeting since Billy Jones ran McRae’s Restaurant on East Pikes Peak Avenue, and by the middle 1940s it had settled at the Indian Grill. Among its regulars was Harry H. Hoiles, the publisher of the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph.

Joseph Besseghini died on July 21, 1956, at age 63. His estate, according to the litigation that followed, continued to receive royalties on the dressing until 1957, and then stopped.

That same year the restaurant changed hands again. In August 1957, George R. Wadsworth and John E. Graney — Wadsworth a former investment banker, Graney the man who would manage the place day to day — bought the Indian Grill from Borchert and took it on as a partnership.

The royalty question, meanwhile, had escalated into a lawsuit. On March 22, 1960, the First National Bank of Colorado Springs, acting as executor of Besseghini’s estate, sued for $1.2 million in damages. The defendants were Castlegate, Inc.; Bluhill Nevada, Inc.; Richard E. Newman, Bluhill’s president; and Edgar J. Schoen, a Bluhill stockholder. The complaint traced the dressing’s ownership through a chain of transfers: Besseghini had invented the recipe and licensed it to Castlegate in 1944; Castlegate had registered it as its own in 1950 while still paying him; seven years after that, Castlegate sold the formula to a corporation headed by Schoen, who sold it in turn to Bluhill. The suit was filed in El Paso County District Court at Colorado Springs and was on file in the U.S. District Court in Denver the following day, where the wire services picked it up under headlines about a stolen recipe. That a Colorado Springs restaurateur’s kitchen recipe had generated a seven-figure federal claim four years after his death says something about how far a bottle of dressing could travel in the middle of the 20th century.

The seven-year interval in that chain is not arbitrary. Castlegate went out of business on August 31, 1957, and the formula went out the door with everything else. The firm did not go quietly. In October 1959, five months before the Besseghini estate sued it, Castlegate filed a $2.4 million antitrust action of its own in federal court at Sioux Falls, where it had by then moved its main office, against National Tea Company, National Dairy Products Corporation, its Kraft subsidiary, and Miller’s Super Markets of Colorado and Wyoming. The 23-page complaint said the company had been in business 65 years and had operated successfully across 11 northwestern states under the Bluhill trademark, but that because so much of that territory was thinly populated it had to lean on its profits at home in Denver and Cheyenne — where, it charged, Safeway and Miller between them controlled 60 percent of the consumer trade in the first city and 80 percent in the second. It accused the national processors of making secret payments to large retailers for display space and of spending millions on publicists to advertise the superiority of their products — practices, Castlegate alleged, that put it out of business. Whatever the merits, the effect was plain enough: The company that had been paying Joe Besseghini his royalties was, by the autumn of 1957, a company with nothing left to pay them with.

None of this appears to have troubled the dining room. Wadsworth and Graney continued to trade on the collection that had always distinguished the place, and in 1960 they extended it, advertising its “superb collection of original Western paintings” for customers to look at, with the reassurance — necessary, perhaps, once you have begun advertising fine art — that the kitchen still offered “Good Food at Reasonable Prices.”

The Indian Grill lasted two more years. It closed on September 20, 1962, and the news ran on the front page of the Gazette Telegraph. The reason the partners gave was neither bankruptcy nor rent nor changing tastes. Wadsworth and Graney were dissolving the partnership and shutting the restaurant, they said, because of the long hours the business demanded of both men. Thirty years of downtown lunches and dinners had come down to an arithmetic of fatigue. The one loose end that concerned the community was the walls: the Indian lore and early Western art that had covered them since Besseghini’s day would, the partners expected, be sold in a single transaction and kept together as a collection.

The Rock Pile decamped to the Village Inn on East Pikes Peak Avenue — a restaurant founded in 1936 by John Ceresa, a Broadmoor veteran who had also spent several years as the Indian Grill’s chef — where 14 years later some 25 business and professional leaders were still turning up for lunch. The storefront at 27 East Pikes Peak Avenue became a Franklin Optical. George Wadsworth did not long outlive the restaurant; in 1966, at age 61, he was found dead in the garage of his home of carbon monoxide poisoning. John Graney died in Arlington, Texas, in 1972, at age 60.

The building outlasted the restaurant by only 11 years. The Chief Theatre showed its last motion picture on October 31, 1972, after the Exchange National Bank — which held a 99-year lease with a demolition option, and which stood next door — declared the structure unsafe. The Landmarks Council of the Pikes Peak Region took up the fight, won the building a place on the National Register of Historic Places, and pressed the city council to acquire it. That effort collapsed in a manner peculiar to a small city: When the council weighed whether to put a purchase before the voters, two of its own members had to stand aside because they sat as trustees of the bank. An engineering report concluding that the theater proper was structurally sound made no difference either. Demolition followed in 1973. The old Burns Building — by then renamed the Chief Building — proved so well built that tearing it down cost about twice what it had cost to build. Fixtures scattered. In 1977 a solid brass chandelier from the Indian Grill surfaced in a local story, an artifact of an artifact.

The dressing was the last thing standing. The “Indian Grill” trademark, still held of record by Bluhill Foods, Inc., was renewed for an additional 20 years in 1970 — eight years after the restaurant that gave it its name had locked its doors. The registration was not renewed a second time, and it lapsed in 1992, 60 years after Joe Besseghini opened a storefront under a movie marquee and hung Native American relics on its walls.

August 16, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Algonac/ Michigan

Sid’s Tartar Sauce

Sid’s

9715 St. Clair River Drive
Algonac, Michigan

1945 – 1976

In 1933 Ray Hagle opened a livery on the lower St. Clair River a mile and a half north of Algonac, on the road that carried traffic north from Detroit toward Marine City and Port Huron. His customers went out after pickerel — known everywhere else as walleye — on a stretch of water the town was already advertising, without much modesty, as the pickerel capital of the world. They came back cold, and Hagle began making soup and carrying it down to the docks. Sometime around 1935 he cleared out one room of the livery, put tables in it, and started cooking the fish his customers brought back, within sight of the water it had come out of. Nothing about the arrangement suggested permanence. It would last, in one form or another, for the better part of 90 years.

Algonac in the 1930s was a boat town in the literal sense: it made them. Chris Smith had been building hulls there since 1874, and by the time of the Great Depression the Chris-Craft works at the south end of Algonac was the largest producer of mahogany runabouts in the world and the largest employer for miles. Garfield Arthur Wood — the Gray Fox, winner of the Harmsworth Trophy, and a serial holder of the world water speed record — kept his own operations and reputation nearby. Freighters ran the channel a few hundred feet off the bank, close enough to read the names on their bows. The commercial logic of a riverside eating place was obvious to anyone who stood on the seawall for five minutes, and Hagle’s grew into it gradually, adding sandwiches and hamburgers, and, during the war years, drinks and evenings of dancing.

The man who bought Hagle’s operation in 1945 came upriver from Detroit with a name already attached to a business. Sidney A. McQueen had run Sid’s Cafe at 15241 East Warren Avenue, on Detroit’s east side, and had promoted it with the flat confidence of the period. A Decoration Day advertisement in 1940 aimed squarely at weekend golfers, pitching a breakfast bar that opened at seven on weekdays (“Good Food — Fast Service — Reasonable Prices”) and dinners from 11:30 on Sundays. In 1942 he threw a grand opening for a new cocktail lounge and an enlarged, redecorated dining room; the advertisement counted 388,600 dinners served the year before, on premium beef and fowl, and closed on the house pun, “Our Reputation Is at Steak.” Two years later McQueen sold the Warren Avenue business to Sol Boesky of the Banner Novelty Company, to be run by Boesky’s brother Sam, and within a year he had bought Hagle’s place on the St. Clair River and hung his own name on it.

What reopened on May 1, 1946, was Sid’s Tavern, and the advertising made a point of the continuity: the same standard of food and service the establishment had been known for over the previous 11 years, now under McQueen. He had also acquired a sideline that reads today like a small marvel of local networking. In partnership with Conrad J. Berger of Algonac, McQueen took on a dealership for Gar Wood boats and put the sales room directly next door to his tavern. Berger was not a casual choice. He had gone to work for Gar Wood in September 1928 at its Highland Park plant, moved on to Wood’s personal shop at his Grayhaven estate, and worked at the Algonac plant on the Liberty-Gar Wood marine engines; his association with the company ran to some four decades. The advertisements offered marine taxi service and speedboat rides on the river, promoted the new hulls as styled by Norman Bel Geddes, the brilliant theatrical and industrial designer, and urged customers to order early for delivery. It was a short-lived business. Gar Wood showed four painted, unvarnished models at the 1947 boat show and stopped building boats within months.

The restaurant, by contrast, was becoming a destination. In 1949 it turned up in Ford Times, the monthly travel magazine published by Ford Motor Company, which described it as a spot where diners got a ringside seat on one of the world’s busiest inland waterways — freighters and passenger ships passing during the navigation season, some of them not a hundred feet from the window tables — with deep-fried Lake Erie pickerel named as the dish to order against that backdrop. It was the first appearance of a formula the place would work for the next quarter-century: the view, and the fish.

That same year James and Lillian Mattas bought the business. Mattas was not a restaurant man by trade. A native of Rhode Island who had lived in the Detroit area since the early 1920s, he was a co-founder and later the president of the Columbia Steel Treating Company. He and his wife treated the Algonac restaurant as a permanent construction project. Over the following decade and a half they enlarged it repeatedly, carpeted it, air-conditioned it, and glassed in as much of the river frontage as the footprint allowed, adding two rooms that regulars would name for years afterward — the Seaway Room and the Captain’s Cove. A local history written while the family still held the place called it one of the showplaces of the riverfront, which was less boosterism than a plain description of what had happened to a converted boat livery.

Postcards from those years document the transformation better than any prose. A linen card copyrighted in 1957 shows a long, low, blue-gray building strung out along the seawall, its river side almost entirely window, with lawn chairs — white, green, red — set out on the grass a few feet from the current, and a rooftop sign reading, in all caps, “Sid’s Dinners.” The message on the back is pure mid-century salesmanship: the million-dollar view of the St. Clair River, the largest completely glassed dining room on the river, open year-round, completely air-conditioned. Under that, three words: “Just Good Food.” The same phrase was fired in red type onto the drinking glasses and shot glasses, above the line “On the St. Clair River, Algonac.” A photo card from the same period shows the restaurant’s highway side — a gravel lot full of two-tone sedans, striped awnings, a sign for Vernors ginger ale, and a canopy running down toward the docks.

Active management passed to the owners’ son in 1956, when Charles J. Mattas came home from military service and took over the day-to-day running of the restaurant. The succession had been settled well in advance. In January 1953 a local newspaper reported that Charles had graduated from the University of Detroit with a bachelor’s degree in business administration and would enter the armed services at the end of February — and that on his discharge he would assume management of his father’s bar and dining room at Algonac. He came back at the moment the river was about to change character. The St. Lawrence Seaway opened in 1959, and saltwater ships from Europe began working their way up past the seawall alongside the lakers. The Mattases renamed the restaurant to match, and Sid’s became Sid’s on the Seaway — a name that would hold on menus, matchbooks, and roadside signs, with one interruption, until 1976, even as the sign painters and postcard printers kept mixing it with Sid’s on the River and Sid’s Dinners.

The 1960s were the peak years. A Mother’s Day advertisement in 1962 offered a complete dinner, entrée and dessert included, for $2.50, with a fish fry every Friday night. A 1965 newspaper ad reduced the whole proposition to “finest foods, liquors, entertainment” — and, in a box at the right, the three words that mattered most to the summer trade, “Dock or Park.” Menus and matchbooks billed the place as a restaurant and nightclub, which is roughly what a riverfront supper club in that market had to be to fill tables in February as well as July.

By then the industry that had filled Sid’s dining room was leaving. Chris-Craft moved its administrative offices from Algonac to Pompano Beach, Florida, in 1957; the Smith family sold the company to NAFI Corporation in 1960; and the Algonac plant, the town’s chief employer, shut down in 1970, with the last wooden Chris-Craft — a 57-foot Constellation — completed shortly after. The freighters kept coming, but the payroll that had underwritten Friday fish fries and Saturday nights did not.

The name came off once before the end, and that experiment came from inside the family. In March 1973 Charles Mattas bought a Black Angus franchise and reopened the restaurant as Sid’s Black Angus. It did not take. Eighteen months later the sign said Sid’s on the Seaway again.

The end came in 1976, and it was a decision to leave the business rather than to change it. On June 13 the Port Huron Times Herald reported that Sid’s on the Seaway — by then billed as a nightclub as much as a restaurant — had been sold, pending transfer of the liquor license, to Gerald Silvas, who had owned the Voyageur in St. Clair for 13 years and who had approached Mattas because he wanted the riverfront location. “Basically, it will be the same type of restaurant,” Silvas said, allowing that he had changes in mind but would not make them public because they involved so many people. Mattas, who had opened Sid’s 27 years earlier, would not discuss figures. “I just wanted to get out of business,” he said, and named the Iron Mountain region of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula as the place he meant to retire to. He put down August 1 as the probable date for the transfer, and he was right almost to the day.

On August 1 the Times Herald carried an advertisement for excellent seafood and steaks, live entertainment Monday through Saturday, dancing to Orion on Friday and Saturday nights, and Larry Burda six nights a week in the Captain’s Cove — the lounge keeping the name the Mattases had given it. The restaurant underneath was the Channel Marker, and in smaller type along the bottom, by way of directions: “Formerly Sid’s.” The name had lasted 31 years on that stretch of bank, 27 of them under the Mattases.

Sidney McQueen outlived his name on the building by eight months. He had left Michigan for Florida in the mid-1950s, and he died at Pompano Beach — the town Chris-Craft had chosen for its headquarters 20 years before — on April 3, 1977, at age 80. The death notice in the Fort Lauderdale News identified him by the two rooms he had run: Sid’s in Detroit and Sid’s in Algonac.

James C. Mattas died on April 4, 1982, at age 76, in the Iron Mountain country his son had named six years earlier.

The Channel Marker held the site for six years. In 1982 the building passed to the Brengman family of Detroit, who, after four months of renovations, reopened it as Captain 2 on the Strait — a second Captain’s, after the Captain’s Lounge near Detroit’s City Airport and the Captain 2 the family had opened on Mack Avenue around 1977. The Brengmans believed the venture was fated, and the reason was a Detroit connection that closed a circle nobody had planned. Ed Brengman’s grandfather, the family said, had worked for Sid’s in Detroit for 30 years before the business moved to Clay Township; when it went, he chose to stay in the old neighborhood and opened a restaurant of his own, which is where the family trade began. Whether or not the arithmetic of those 30 years is exact, the lineage the Brengmans described ran straight back to the cafe on East Warren Avenue that Sid McQueen had sold in 1944.

The building outlived all of them. Jack Lietke bought the restaurant in 1993 and renamed it Anthony’s, after the son-in-law who ran it. In 1997 it passed to the McRae family, who called it McRae’s Big River Grille, kept the telephone number that had begun life as Swift 4-3041, and printed the Hagle story on their own materials, dating the house to 1933 and crediting a German immigrant couple who rented boats and cooked what their customers caught. They ran it for roughly two decades on the same two assets Sid McQueen had bought in 1945 — fresh perch and a wall of glass facing the shipping channel.

It is gone now. The restaurant closed, the building came down, and by 2023 the parcel at 9715 St. Clair River Drive was an empty lot with a seawall. The freighters still pass a hundred feet off the bank, and the Algonac Lions Club still runs a pickerel tournament every year on the Fourth of July.

August 15, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Indianapolis/ Indiana

Pumpkin Pie

Hawthorn Room

1611 North Meridian Street
Indianapolis, Indiana

1942 – 1974

Thomas D. Adams originally set out to become a doctor. He was a Kentuckian who had put in three years of pre-medical study at Eastern Kentucky State College in Richmond, and to help pay for his schooling he took a part-time job in one of Cincinnati’s top restaurants. Within a year he was its general manager, and the medical degree quietly disappeared from his plans. He studied landscape architecture in Cincinnati, drifted the rest of the way into restaurant management, and when the firm he worked for needed someone to look at a property in Indianapolis that was not doing well, Adams drew the assignment.

The property was the Seville Restaurant, which had opened in the fall of 1929 in the lower level of the Kahn Building at 7 North Meridian Street, a few steps off Monument Circle. It was meant to bring a taste of old Spain to downtown Indianapolis — with a gold and black scheme meant to evoke a Spanish courtyard and wrought-iron ornamentation everywhere — but it had the misfortune of opening within weeks of the Wall Street Crash of 1929. Adams took over as manager in 1931. His son, Thomas D. Adams, Jr., had been born in Cincinnati on February 4, 1930, and came north to Indianapolis as an infant. Adams’s sister, Elisabeth J. Adams, a Kentucky native who had graduated from Transylvania College in Lexington and taken a master’s degree in dietetics at the University of Tennessee, had joined her brother in the Cincinnati venture and followed him to Indiana as well. By any account, Adams got the Seville sorted out. In time he owned it — though not alone. He held it jointly with Max J. Comisar, and the two of them together owned and operated Sevilles in both Indianapolis and Dayton, Ohio.

By the end of the 1930s Adams was looking north. The stretch of Meridian above 16th Street was then a corridor of large Victorian houses in the middle of a slow conversion to other uses — funeral homes, apartment buildings, offices — and the intersection sat at the doorstep of the city’s entertainment district. Adams petitioned in 1941 for permission to operate a restaurant there. In 1942 he incorporated the venture with two partners — his wife, Ida Mae Adams, and Comisar, his partner in the Seville and the Dayton restaurateur credited with bringing fine dining to that city, who had opened the first Seville there in 1928 — and in the spring of that year the Hawthorn Room opened at 1611 North Meridian Street, on the northeast corner of 16th.

The building was low and pale — a one-story restaurant in the picturesque colonial manner then in fashion, its brick and framework painted white and the whole property enclosed by an old-fashioned white fence. A covered drive-in off Meridian, the porte-cochère, let patrons alight at the front entrance before the car continued on to a paved and lighted lot at the rear for some 50 vehicles. Later expansions grew outward from an existing brick dwelling on the lot to the north, which a tunnel joined to the kitchen and which held the commissary and storeroom, offices, showers, dressing rooms, and a lounge for employees.

Inside, the main dining room was arranged around a hawthorn tree, and the tree was the entire idea. Leslie F. Ayres, a prominent Indianapolis architect and artist, devised a huge, stage-like hawthorn whose branches spread over a circular counter: large flat leaves painted bright green against a mass of red haws, lighting fixtures shaped like bird cages hanging from the boughs, and thorns jutting from the limbs, the larger of them pressed into service as hat hooks. An oak bench circled the base, where patrons waited their turn at the counter, and the terrazzo underfoot ran green to suggest grass, patterned with fallen hawthorn leaves. The counter itself was oak and inverted, so that diners sat on the inside and were served from the outer rim, on stools upholstered in rust, brown, blue, and chartreuse. On an end wall Frederick M. Rash, an Indianapolis artist, painted the four seasons of the hawthorn — the white and reddish blossom, and the haws that resemble miniature apples. (Rash would go on to serve in World War II and to work for Howard Hughes, producing art renderings for the Spruce Goose and other projects.) That last detail is almost certainly why so many customers thought that the Hawthorn’s centerpiece was an apple tree.

Beyond the counter the main dining room ran the full length of the building, two steps down, finished in natural oak and divisible by ceiling-high drapes into semi-private stretches. A sunken terrace enclosed by a large bay window and screened with Venetian blinds fronted off it, furnished in wrought iron with black Formica tops; a compact private room off the front of the dining room seated 12. The entire interior was air-conditioned year-round, with acoustical ceilings to deaden the noise.

One decision shaped the restaurant’s clientele more than any other: The Hawthorn Room served no alcohol, and never would. That made it a natural home for sorority luncheons, women’s clubs, and church groups, and it placed the Hawthorn squarely in the local tearoom tradition then represented downtown by the Canary Cottage on the Circle and the tearoom on the fifth floor of the L. S. Ayres & Company department store. It also meant that the restaurant had to live or die on its food, since there was no bar revenue to prop up a thin evening.

The food was built on abundance without ostentation. Every dinner arrived as a full sequence — an appetizer, a salad, two side dishes, and dessert — which made it very difficult for a diner to leave the Hawthorn Room hungry. The signature items were a roto-cut steak, Indiana fried chicken, and the butterscotch rolls that became the restaurant’s trademark. Chef William Hanna presided over the kitchen and would hold the position for all but the restaurant’s final years; he had come up through the Seville, and he trained the whole kitchen staff himself in what the house called “made-from-scratch” home cooking. Alongside him for most of those years stood a second chef, Cleo Edwards, who shared charge of food preparation, retired briefly near the end, and came back.

The restaurant kept long hours and odd ones. In 1946, with Adams listed as manager, the Hawthorn stayed open to provide after-theater service from nine in the evening until one in the morning, and closed on Wednesdays. That same year it introduced a between-meals interlude called the Soda Snack, an afternoon window of soda-fountain delicacies in which a slice of pie or cake ran 15 cents.

In August 1948 Adams cut the cord to downtown, announcing the sale of his interests in the Seville to his partner, Max J. Comisar of Dayton, Ohio, after 17 years running it. He poured the proceeds into Meridian Street. Additional property acquired along the block gave the Hawthorn an overall frontage of 120 feet and room for a new dining room — the Garden Room, built out over the ground where the driveway had once cut in — plus two private dining rooms. Capacity went from 130 seats to 260. By 1949, with Adams described in the papers as proprietor and 18 years into the restaurant business in Indianapolis, remodeling had brought the building to nearly twice its original size. Expansion continued northward, eventually overtaking the house next door and yielding the Saddle Room, where the family’s equestrian trophies and tack were displayed, and the 500 Room, featuring a hand-painted mural of the start of the Memorial Day race.

Then, in 1951, the place nearly burned. Fire tore through the restaurant and left roughly $100,000 in damage behind, running through the 500 Room, the Garden Room, and the Flat Saddle Room. One fireman, describing the main dining room to a reporter, said it “was belching and roaring like a furnace.” Adams rebuilt, and rebuilt larger.

The rebuilt Hawthorn Room is the one that acquired a national reputation, and it did so partly on the strength of a single visit. Clementine Paddleford, the New York Herald Tribune and This Week food writer who logged half a million miles hunting down American regional cooking, arrived in 1952 and filed a rapturous column. She had, she reported, “made a 250-mile detour from Detroit to Indianapolis” on her way to New York — for pumpkin pie. She found the fried chicken “done to perfection in Midwest style,” the mashed potatoes “whipped to snowy lightness,” and, in the milk gravy made in the same pan as the chicken, “not a lump.” The butterscotch rolls she dispatched in three words: “yum, yum, yum.”

Paddleford also included a vivid physical description of the interior. The restaurant was then feeding as many as 2,000 people on a good day, across a warren built on three floor levels with four rooms opening more or less into one another. The room men liked best, she observed, was the one whose walls carried murals tracing an Indianapolis 500 race from start to finish. There was a circular counter for solo diners who did not want the exposure of a table. Before she left she collected recipes for roast-beef hash, cherry cobbler, Indiana pumpkin pie, and sour-cream raisin pie, and printed all four.

The Hawthorn kept modernizing at the edges while leaving the core alone. A 1957 advertisement made a small technological boast of the fried chicken, which was by then “pressure-fried in just 10 minutes” — long enough, the copy promised, for juicy tenderness inside and golden crispness out. Downtown that same year, the Seville that had launched Adams’s career disappeared, remade by Comisar, who had bought him out nine years earlier, into the King Cole, an oak-paneled English room hung with European oil paintings.

Geography turned the Hawthorn into an industry canteen. WFBM-TV was at 1330 North Meridian, WISH-TV at 1440, and WLWI between them, with radio operations attached and advertising agencies clustered nearby. Media Row ate lunch at 16th and Meridian, day after day. Adams leaned into the restaurant’s name with enormous blown-up photographs of hawthorn trees on the walls — trees, by one account, that grew in his own backyard. In the bar area, where the only thing poured was coffee, a large wooden tree rose to the ceiling with dollar bills hanging from its branches. Customers came for particular things and remembered them for decades: the roto steak and the cloverleaf rolls on Sunday evenings, a frozen fruit salad with poppy-seed dressing, the glazed ham loaf. Shortridge High School held its activity dinners there. A couple who had their first date in the restaurant in 1960 would write, 60 years later, that they had “never forgotten” it. A priest who ate there with his father four times a week for years put the verdict plainly: “There is no place like it today.”

By 1961, when the Indianapolis News sent its women’s editor, Thelma Machael, out to profile the operation, the Hawthorn Room had become a wholly family enterprise, and a peculiar one. In summer Adams could be found in midmorning and midafternoon out in a field, hurrying along the rows or bending over tomato plants. He grew Golden Cross Bantam sweet corn and a special hybrid tomato on the family farm at the edge of the city, and he liked to pick them less than an hour before they were served and drive them in himself. Elisabeth Adams, whose menus one admirer described as “home cooking with a touch of Southern hospitality,” ran the menu planning; Machael credited her imagination and her restraint with seasoning in equal measure, and offered as a typical item baked fresh fruits, hot in their own juices and lightly dressed with sugar, cinnamon, and nutmeg, served alongside stuffed pork chops, butterscotch rolls or muffins, and a molded raw vegetable salad. Ida Mae Adams, the corporation’s secretary and by all reports an excellent cook, had been active in developing recipes for the restaurant but was giving more and more of her time to the Hawthorn Restaurant Stables at the farm, where the family bred American saddlebred brood mares and colts for show. The colts went to Danville, Kentucky, to be trained by Garland Bradshaw, and came home from Midwestern rings with trophies and blue ribbons.

The children were embedded in the operation. Dianne Adams, a graduate of Stephens College and Indiana University, was the dining room supervisor; she showed the family’s horses, was finishing a master’s thesis on restaurant management at Michigan State University, and twice a week convened the dining room staff for meetings that used visual aids and open discussion of problem-solving and attitudes. Thomas D. Adams, Jr., the supervisor of kitchen and dining room service, had graduated from Broad Ripple High School and gone on to Indiana University, where he later served as secretary of the I.U. Men’s Club of Indianapolis; he and Elisabeth inspected each plate before it left the kitchen.

The staff, too, had stopped turning over. By 1961 the hostesses Clara Kraft and Jan Carr had been there 17 and ten years respectively; pastry cook Margaret Jessup had 14 years in, second cook Joe Hanna 19, and chef William Hanna 30. The restaurant was open from 11 in the morning until nine at night, seven days a week. That year it also unveiled a redone 500 Room, in which color photographs and photo murals of the race divided the dining space; the plan was to swap in new pictures of the individual qualifiers each May, hung around an enlarged portrait of the winner. Over these two decades the Hawthorn accumulated the recognition that would follow it into its obituaries: It had appeared in Duncan Hines’s Adventures in Good Eating guides for more than 20 consecutive years, long enough to earn the guide’s “Fifth of a Century” award, an honor it shared locally with the Russet Cafeteria on South Meridian Street.

The unwinding took two years and involved three owners. In 1972 Adams sold the Hawthorn Restaurant to Merrill Cohen, a well-known Indianapolis restaurateur whose firm operated two Stockholm House restaurants among other properties. Adams died the same year, at age 70. By then his interests had spread well beyond the corner that made him: He owned the Hawthorn Heights Apartments and the Hawthorn Plaza Shopping Center, both carrying forward the name of a restaurant he had opened during World War II.

The Hawthorn’s own advertising that July, a full page of house copy published a few weeks after the sale, reads like an inventory taken before a move. Seven rooms now, grown out of a small restaurant with one odd counter. More than 150 years of service among the kitchen staff alone and another 150 across the waitresses, hostesses, and cashiers, with Irene Gantz, Vivian Ford, and Henry Caldwell past 20 years each, Norma Reed at 17, and nobody under five. A luncheon menu rewritten daily and served from 11 to 4, complete for $1.35 to $1.95; dinner from 4 to 8, at least nine entrees at $2.15 to $3.75, each arriving with its appetizer, potato, vegetable, salad, hot breads, dessert, and beverage. The counter still drew the solitary diners it had been built for, offering, the copy claimed, privacy without loneliness. The 500 Room by now carried a huge photographic mural of the start of the 1950 race and a gallery of driver portraits. And the phrase the house reached for to describe what a new owner had just bought was “the old-time tea room atmosphere.”

Cohen leased the establishment out, and in 1973 a new operator, Nick Farris, took over with a stated intention of restoring what had been lost. Farris promised gradual refurbishing of each of the seven dining rooms. “We want to recreate the tearoom atmosphere,” he told a reporter. It was the right diagnosis and the wrong moment. Longtime restaurant personnel would say afterward that business had been declining steadily for several years.

What finally closed the Hawthorn Room was a meat bill. Farris Restaurants, Inc., owed $3,400 to Stark, Wetzel & Company, the Indianapolis firm founded in 1936 and known across the region for its luncheon meats and sausage. When the bill went unpaid in early June 1974, creditors forced the business into receivership. On June 21, the Indianapolis Star columnist Thomas R. Keating gave readers the news in a single paragraph tucked between an item about a wandering man at the Democratic state convention and a note on contract talks with the Indianapolis Pacers basketball team. The Hawthorne Room Restaurant at 1611 North Meridian Street, he wrote — the paper spelled it with the terminal e that half of Indianapolis used — “long was one of the finest eating places in the Midwest,” and would close down that weekend, “possibly for good.” It was. The sale of what was left came on Tuesday, July 23, at one in the afternoon, by order of Judge Glenn W. Funk of the Marion Superior Court: the fixtures, equipment, and supplies of the “Hawthorne Room Restaurant,” offered in their entirety or in lots and parcels, handled by a firm on East Washington Street that advertised itself as a liquidator of all kinds of businesses.

The building stood empty for three years. It was razed in the summer of 1977, and that December a local franchisee opened a McDonald’s restaurant on the site — the city’s newest at the time, since replaced by a different structure, still selling hamburgers where the porte-cochère used to be. The parking lot and the restaurant together now occupy most of the 1600 block of Meridian.

The people scattered into other lives. Thomas D. Adams, Jr., who had spent his working years checking plates at 16th and Meridian, turned to the passion he had carried since attending his first Indianapolis 500 at age 16 in 1946: He founded Adams Automotive Associates, built racing engines, entered two cars in the 500, and ran stock cars with his friend Leon Duray “Jigger” Sirois, a race-car driver from Shelby, Indiana. Adams was a drummer, too, and kept playing with jazz bands around the city. He moved to Largo, Florida, came home to Indianapolis late, and died there on October 5, 2018, at age 88. Among the handful of messages left in his online guest book was one from Jeannine Gantz Toon, whose mother, Irene, had waited tables at the Hawthorn Room for more than 20 years and called him Tommy. His obituary preserved the phrase one of his longtime caregivers had used for him: he was “the last of the true gentlemen.”

August 14, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Cadillac/ Michigan

Cinnamon Pudding

Kelly’s Restaurant

124 South Mitchell Street
Cadillac, Michigan

1942 – 1968

In the spring of 1941 the directors of the Cadillac State Bank in Cadillac, Michigan, decided to move. The bank had occupied the same corner at South Mitchell and West Cass Streets since 1901, and its stockholders now voted to relocate down the block into the building the Peoples Savings Bank had abandoned when it failed during the Great Depression. That left a handsome and thoroughly obsolete piece of real estate on the market, and George Banks Kelly wanted it. He paid $14,000 for the yellow-brick building and set about the extensive remodeling required to convert it into a restaurant. He opened Kelly’s Restaurant there in 1942.

The building Kelly bought had been put up as a statement. Banking on that corner traced back to 1883, when D. A. Blodgett of Grand Rapids and D. F. Diggins of Cadillac opened a private banking house under the Blodgett name, with Diggins running it day to day. Diggins withdrew in June 1892 to join the lumber firm of Blodgett, Cummer & Diggins. In 1895 the private house was reorganized under state law as the Cadillac State Bank, capitalized at $50,000, with lumberman Frank J. Cobbs as president and S. W. Kramer as vice president. Deposits nearly tripled in the bank’s first seven years, and in 1901 the directors spent the profits on a new building at Mitchell and Cass. A county history published two years later described the interior with obvious pride: “mosaic floors and mahogany woodwork throughout,” the teller fixtures milled from selected mahogany as well, a heavy steel burglar-proof vault, and two additional fireproof vaults for securities and ledgers.

None of that was of much use to a restaurateur. Kelly’s crews had to pull the cages, break out the vault doors, and carve a kitchen, a counter, and a dining room out of a floor plan built to keep money in one place and people at a distance. When the work was done the corner had a new face entirely — a low, flat-roofed streamline-moderne front with rounded corners and dark trim, the name “Kelly’s” lettered in tall red script across both the Mitchell and Cass elevations, and, above the door, a smaller line that mattered a great deal in the 1940s: “Air Conditioned.”

Kelly was not new to feeding Cadillac. He had come up in the business as the proprietor of Kelly’s Soda Grill, a fountain-service café in the Lyric Theatre Building at 202 South Mitchell, just across Cass Street from the bank corner. The theatre had opened in 1918, a 1,000-seat house operated by the Fitzpatrick-McElroy circuit under manager George H. Kennedy, with novelty “automobile box seats” in the balcony saluting the industry that was displacing the lumber trade. A café attached to a theater that size did steady trade twice a night, plus whatever the downtown shoppers brought in between shows. But a soda fountain is not a restaurant, and by 1941 Kelly clearly wanted the other thing.

His timing was better than it looked. Cadillac in 1941 was not a lumber town anymore; the last hardwood stand in Wexford County had been cut in 1934, and the mills that had built the place were gone or going. What replaced them was a diversified manufacturing economy — metal fabricators, rubber goods, garment plants, and, beginning that February, Chris-Craft, the Algonac-based boatbuilder, which had bought a former Mitchell Brothers plant to expand production against the military contracts it saw coming with World War II and rolled out its first Cadillac-built pleasure boat on February 25. The city sat at the junction of three highways, held the state highway department’s district headquarters for 24 counties, and had been identified by the 1936 Federal Marketing Atlas as the trading center for 33 surrounding communities. J. C. Penney had arrived in 1925, Montgomery Ward in 1928, H. L. Green in 1940. The city had imposed a two-hour parking limit in 1937 and would install meters in 1947. A restaurant at Mitchell and Cass was standing in the middle of the current.

Kelly’s Restaurant caught on quickly. The room itself, as it appears on the souvenir postcard Kelly had printed by the Harry Baker Company of Grand Rapids, was less a white-tablecloth dining room than a well-run American café raised a grade. The interior panel shows a long service counter beneath a sweeping curved canopy finished in pale blue-green, wooden captain’s chairs, a decorative floral motif painted high on the wall, and the general air of a place that could turn a table fast at noon and still hold a steak dinner at seven. Steaks, in fact, were on the menu, which would matter later.

By the mid-1950s George and Ethel Kelly had expanded north along Mitchell Street. They acquired the Northwood Hotel, the three-story brick establishment at the corner of Mitchell and East Harris that was, and had long been, the most consequential building in downtown Cadillac. Its lot had been sold in 1873 by G. H. Cook to D. C. McKinnon for $1,050, on a rumor that a mammoth hotel was coming; the rumor proved out, and the Hotel McKinnon opened the following year in the village of Clam Lake — incorporated as the city of Cadillac in 1877 — and drew crowds partly on the strength of a patented dining-room stove that needed no flue. In the 1920s the owners bought the property to the north and rebuilt the whole structure at a reported cost of $350,000, including the expense of refacing it in brick. Renamed The Northwood Hotel, it opened in July 1928 with a ballroom its advertising called the finest in northern Michigan, a five-chair barber shop, a coffee shop, a portico sheltering the East Harris Street entrance, and a view of Lake Cadillac.

Prosperity, however, did not follow. The Michigan Trust Company of Grand Rapids took the hotel by foreclosure decree on August 25, 1940, against $63,795.26 in obligations dating from 1928 and 1933 that had never been paid, and the property changed hands repeatedly through the war years and after.

The Kellys ran the hotel and their restaurant as a single proposition and printed new postcards to say so. One card carried three panels — the Northwood on the left, Kelly’s exterior and interior on the right — under a line on the reverse announcing that “Kelly’s Restaurant now joins hands with the Northwood Hotel under one-owner managership.” For a traveling salesman coming up U.S. 131, that was the whole pitch: a fireproof room with a telephone and a real restaurant a block and a half away.

Which is how, on the afternoon of Monday, November 4, 1963, Louis Armstrong came to be eating a steak dinner in Kelly’s Restaurant.

The chain of events bordered on the absurd. The Cadillac Chamber of Commerce had built its membership drive around an exhibition jump by Kim Emmons-Knor, the hometown skydiver who had won a world championship the year before. After her jump, hundreds of small white parachutes were released over the city, two of them carrying free memberships in the chamber. Louis Armstrong and The All Stars had checked into the Northwood Hotel the day before. Walking around town that Monday, one of the musicians spotted a white parachute snagged in a tree. Inside was a membership card. The band found its way to the chamber’s office — a log cabin in the city park — and Armstrong himself presented the ticket. Keith McKellop, the president of the chamber, had an annual dinner scheduled that night at Caberfae Lodge and a band with an eight o’clock show in Traverse City, so he improvised an induction ceremony for five o’clock under the Northwood’s portico. The Cadillac Evening News ran a story the next day under the headline “Living legend joins Cadillac Chamber Monday.”

The part of the afternoon that Cadillac actually remembered, though, happened at Kelly’s. The junior high school sat two blocks east of Mitchell Street, and after the last bell students walked downtown to loiter. One group was inside the restaurant when they noticed who was at the table with his wife, working through a steak. Charlie Nystrom went over. “Pardon me sir, are you Mr. Louis Armstrong?” he asked, and remembered decades later how courteously the answer came back. Down the street at the soda fountain in Cunningham’s Drug Store the news traveled fast; Bill White abandoned whatever he was drinking and ran for Kelly’s, awestruck at meeting a man his parents had talked about his whole life. Patty Cuddeback Kingsbury followed White and found Armstrong plainly delighted by the knot of teenagers crowding his table. Later, when word came that he was standing in front of the hotel, Kay Kendall left a cherry Coke on the counter at Cunningham’s, went out the back door, and got his autograph on a sheet of paper torn from a spiral binder.

Armstrong was at a strange point in his career that fall. He had not made a record in two years and the swing era that made him was two decades gone. In December, a month after the parachute jump, he recorded “Hello, Dolly!”; the following May it knocked the Beatles out of the number-one spot on the Billboard chart..

The Kellys closed their restaurant in May 1969, having sold the Northwood Hotel 11 weeks earlier, and moved to Florida. George Kelly died in 1981 at age 80; Ethel died in 1986 at age 79.

The vault is long gone, the moderne facade has been worked over more than once, and the address at 124 South Mitchell Street now belongs to RE/MAX Central, whose agents sell lakefront property out of the room where four Cadillac eighth-graders once interrupted Louis Armstrong’s dinner.

August 12, 2026 By Bill Hogan

Las Vegas/ Nevada

House Scampi

Philips Supper House

4545 West Sahara Avenue
Las Vegas, Nevada

1978 – 2002

The invitations went out for a benefit opening on February 6, 1978, which was one way of announcing that the strange green-and-white house at 4545 West Sahara Avenue in Las Vegas was in fact a restaurant. Philip Deale had spent the previous months building it — 9,000 square feet of gingerbread trim, mansard angles, and Victorian porch work, dropped onto an almost empty stretch of desert road between Arville Street and Decatur Boulevard. The Strip lay two and a half miles east, close enough that Deale’s advertising could eventually describe the drive as five minutes, far enough that most of Las Vegas considered the location a mistake. Many residents thought exactly that when Deale quietly opened his Edwardian-New England supper house for business.

Deale had not come to the restaurant business through a kitchen. Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1928, he served in the U.S. Army and arrived in Las Vegas about 1958, when the valley held perhaps 60,000 people. By the early 1970s Deale was developing commercial real estate on the west side, and in October 1972 he and general contractor Bernie North broke ground on Sahara West Village, a 12,000-square-foot retail strip in Spanish-mode slump stone at West Sahara and Arville. It stood on the same stretch of West Sahara where Philips Supper House would rise six years later.

In September 1976 Deale and a partner named Marvin Strusser had made an offer on the Cyril Wengert house at Sixth Street and Charleston Boulevard — a 1939 Tudor mansion, one of the first big homes in Las Vegas, by then serving as the offices of Nevada Southern Title Company — intending to turn it into a gourmet restaurant. The neighbors organized against them. When the zoning change went before the Las Vegas City Commission that December, an attorney for the neighborhood produced a petition carrying 86 signatures, and the commission voted 3-2 to deny it. Unable to get the back 100 feet of the lot zoned commercial, Deale and Strusser abandoned the project. Deale then went back out to West Sahara, where he built Philips Supper House. By the time he broke ground on the restaurant he was 50, and he’d built the place himself — a detail regulars repeated for years afterward.

One of his first hires said a good deal about the clientele he expected. To greet guests at the door, Deale installed Walter Slaughter, who had spent the previous 23 years as an agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as the host. In a town where the line between civic leadership and organized crime was more of a suggestion, installing a career G-man at the entrance of a discreet, alcove-heavy supper club was either a very good joke or very good insurance, and possibly both. Slaughter had left the FBI in 1977 under the federal mandatory retirement program, and he was not finished with public life. That summer he ran as a Republican for the Nevada Assembly in District 5, campaigning to curb plea bargaining — a practice he said had been abused and misused everywhere he had worked — and to strip the sales tax from food and medicine. The restaurant where he spent his evenings stood inside the district he hoped to represent. He lost.

Deale had designed his restaurant to make people feel unobserved, with intimate alcoves, a cocktail lounge, and self-parking on site — an amenity worth advertising in a city where every other good restaurant sat behind a casino’s valet stand. By 1983 the restaurant sat about 230 in its dining areas with banquet seating for 50, and by 1987 it had grown to some 270 seats across three dining rooms, with more than two dozen booths, an 80-seat banquet room, and a bar that doubled as a waiting room; the trade press that year put its full capacity as high as 320. Whatever the count on a given night, the geometry never changed: a large restaurant chopped deliberately into small rooms, six of which held anywhere from five to 17 people.

The semi-private geometry was not decoration. It was strategy. “Our only business is serving dinner,” Deale told the trade magazine Restaurant Business in 1987. “We don’t have slots and games.” In a city where nearly every dining room was a loss leader affixed to a casino floor, Philips had no floor to subsidize it and nothing jangling behind the banquettes. What it had was locals — and, increasingly, conventioneers on expense accounts who wanted three uninterrupted hours away from the noise. “Tourists don’t come to Las Vegas to eat out — they come to laugh and giggle,” Deale explained. “The convention people are looking for a little more. People with expense accounts want to entertain.” He had chosen his ground with that in mind. “I never wanted to be on the Strip,” he said. “The cost would be astronomical. Besides, we’re situated better for locals — and they’re here 52 weeks a year.”

The kitchen backed him up. The menu ran to seafood — including live Maine lobster, flown in and tanked, which was not a common sight in the Mojave in 1981 — alongside steaks, prime rib, lamb chops, and a growing list of Italian specialties. Dinner was served seven days a week from five in the evening until midnight, with reservations suggested.

To keep locals coming on Tuesdays as well as Saturdays, Deale ran what he called the Twilight Menu in the early evening, Sundays through Fridays. In 1987 it was eight items at a flat $8.95, mostly reduced portions of standard dinner offerings — a smaller cut of prime rib, that sort of thing — and it was, by Deale’s account, especially popular with seniors. A decade later the same idea survived under the plainer name of the early-bird, from 4:30 to 6 p.m., with entrees between $8.95 and $14.95. There was one eccentricity in the operating calendar unthinkable for a Las Vegas restaurant today: for years Philips simply shut its doors through July and August and waited out the heat.

The kitchen through those first years belonged to a chef named Louis Puglisi, and it was Puglisi who, around 1980, hired a 16-year-old who had just moved to Las Vegas from Iowa and was knocking on doors along Sahara looking for after-school work. Jerry Bormann had a little fast-food experience and not much else. “Basically, the main job was to wash dishes, prep cook, that type of thing,” he told an interviewer years later. The education that followed was hands-on and occasionally abrupt. “The chef threw a leg of veal on the table and said, ‘Let’s see what you can do with it,’ ” Bormann said. Another time the instruction was simply to cook a steak. “I stood there and cooked a steak,” he said. Four years in, Puglisi left for Phoenix, and Bormann — then just 20 — inherited the range. He would run the kitchen in one capacity or another for most of the next two decades.

It was in the summer of 1983 that Philips Supper House became briefly and unhappily famous. The dispute was peculiar to Las Vegas, where taxicab drivers had long collected “tokes” — kickbacks, in the plainer word — for delivering passengers to restaurants, wedding chapels, motels, and brothels. Deale played that game harder than anyone. Seven restaurants sued in June 1983 — the Flame, the Lobster Trap, Andre’s, the Port Tack, the Golden Steer, Piero’s, and the Cattlemen’s Steak House — alleging that Philips had conspired with taxicab companies and their drivers to divert passengers, and that the restaurant was paying three dollars a head to do it. Philips also outfitted drivers with hats, jackets, and menus advertising the place.

The lead plaintiff was Edward Jaffe, the owner of the venerable Flame, and the attorney was Frank Ellis III, whose investigators took 169 cab rides around the city. In 55 percent of them, Ellis reported, the driver tried to steer the passenger somewhere other than where he had asked to go. The pitch, as Ellis described it, was crude and effective: A rider asking for the Flame would be told the food was bad, the service was worse, and the health department had shut the place down. Ellis sued 11 cab companies, a number of individual drivers, and — in his own characterization — the biggest culprit, Philips Supper House. Jaffe had once paid cabbies 50 cents a head himself; when they pushed for a dollar and he balked, he said, they forgot his address.

Deale’s attorney, Albert Marquis, argued that no one had proven diversion and said his client would gladly stop paying if the rest of the town stopped too, an offer nobody rushed to accept. Marquis conceded the arrangement had become “something of a vicious circle.” The first judge to hear the matter, District Judge Carl Christensen, made his feelings unmistakable, telling both sides that if he were a dictator he would outlaw toking a cab driver altogether, and complaining that a driver could collect three dollars for delivering a turkey — which, he said, is what a passenger becomes when subjected to that kind of practice. The defense promptly asked him to step aside, and he did. The case moved to District Judge John Mendoza, with a ruling due at the end of March 1984 on whether the 11 cab companies would be cut out of the case and tried separately, and with trial set for June. Nevada made diversion an offense carrying a $50 fine, which, as Ellis noted, deterred no one. “The money is just too enticing for the cab drivers,” he said.

No verdict ever came. The parties agreed instead to an injunction against the tipping practice, and it accomplished nothing. “The problem with that was enforcing it,” Ellis said afterward. “As long as the carrot was out there, they kept going back.” Las Vegas City Attorney George Ogilvie was blunter: “The lawsuit really didn’t accomplish much. The parties in the lawsuit agreed to an injunction, but that proved ineffective.” Nevada’s statutes against diverting were by then 23 years old, and the state Taxicab Authority’s regulations carried penalties running from a warning to revocation of a driver’s permit. None of it worked, because all of it pointed at the driver and none of it at whoever was paying him.

So the restaurateurs went around the courts. In August 1985 Las Vegas made it an offense for a licensee to pay a cab driver for delivering customers, punishable by a $250 fine on a first offense, with the City Council empowered to revoke the license of anyone who kept at it. The following month the Clark County Liquor and Gaming Licensing Board wrote the same prohibition into the county Liquor Code and threatened violators with the loss of their licenses. Two people spoke at the hearing, both in favor. One was Van Heffner of the Nevada Restaurant Association, who told the board that reimbursing drivers was where the incentive to divert was born, and that the county amendment supplied the last piece of law the problem needed: the Taxicab Authority rules reached only the driver, he said, while this one reached the restaurateur. The other was Ellis, who called the practice unfair competition and, to his mind, a kickback — and who conceded that the new ordinance had probably finished his own case. The Philips suit had been pending 27 months. It was now, he said, most likely moot.

The litigation did nothing visible to Deale’s standing, and he kept courting out-of-town business through convention programs, airline magazines, advertising at McCarran International Airport (today Harry Reid International Airport), and mailings to meeting planners. For a while the restaurant ran its own van to return customers to their hotels, a service Deale eventually halted. “All you’d have to do is stop fast once and you’d have 14 lawsuits,” he explained. He kept the van anyway and drove it himself when a big convention made cabs impossible to find, using it, as he put it, at his discretion.

In 1985 he doubled down on the conceit that had made the building famous. Jerry Manrico, an Italian-born sculptor who had taught himself bas-relief plaster work and made his living designing restaurants, was commissioned to do the banquet room. What he produced was a 35-foot Golden Gate Bridge in relief, seen as it appears from behind Telegraph Hill — a Bay Area landmark reproduced 1,100 miles from the water, inside a building that was itself a reproduction. Manrico built his scenes up out of wet plaster with two putty knives and his fingers, then sealed them with oil paint cut with epoxy. Guests at wedding receptions and Rotary lunches ate their prime rib beneath his installation for the next 15 years.

In 1989 the day-to-day operation of Philips Supper House passed to younger hands. Bormann and a front-of-house veteran named Louis DeFilippis — who had begun in Las Vegas dining rooms as a waiter at DiMartino & Sons Italian Family Restaurant in 1978 — took over as the restaurant’s co-owners and operators, an arrangement that ran a full decade while Deale remained the name on the marquee and the presence at the door. By the mid-1990s the room drew roughly 65 percent locals and 35 percent tourists, the latter mostly conventioneers, and a considerable number of the locals had been coming since 1978. Bormann described the resulting atmosphere as something close to a family out in the dining rooms, which was charming and also, professionally speaking, a trap.

“Sometimes it’s hard, because every time we try new things, it seems we have to just keep adding and adding and we can never take anything off,” Bormann told a reporter for the Las Vegas Review-Journal in 1997. He repeated the complaint almost verbatim a year later, when a reporter canvassing local chefs about seasonal menus got nowhere with him. “I don’t have a summer menu,” Bormann said. “I have tried fruit salad and things like that, but our clientele is pretty much all regulars.” What he offered instead was accretion: “When we change our menu we don’t take anything off, we just keep adding.” Steak and seafood remained the spine of it. The menu that resulted was long, unfashionable, and exactly what the regulars wanted.

Two dishes carried the house. The first was the House Scampi, and by 1997 Bormann was uncompromising about it: only fresh Mexican white shrimp, jumbo, about a dozen to the pound, dipped in flour and sautéed two or three minutes until three-quarters done, the oil poured off, then finished with lemon, white wine, butter, garlic, and three-quarters of a cup of whipping cream boiled down hard. The shrimp ran about two dollars apiece, which he admitted was punishing. Substitutions were possible; two things were not. “It’s got to be real whipping cream and real butter,” he said. The other signature was scalone — ground abalone and sweet sea scallop meat pressed together, sautéed, and topped with an almond-butter sauce — an old Pacific Coast preparation that had all but vanished from menus elsewhere, and that former patrons would still be hunting for two decades after the restaurant closed. Elsewhere on the card were trout almondine, lobster Dijon, halibut piccata, prime rib, and Australian lobster tails.

There was a second constituency the guidebooks never mentioned. In the retelling of people who worked there, Philips Supper House functioned for years as a tableside clubhouse for the city’s political class, its civic operators and, in the standard Las Vegas formulation, its movers and shakers — a category that in that era shaded, without a firm border, into organized crime. The private booths and the five-seat side rooms were not an accident of floor plan, and neither, one suspects, was the former FBI man at the door. When the Las Vegas Sun revisited the city’s vintage restaurants in 2015, it described Philips flatly as a hangout for politicians, civic leaders, mobsters, and others of that description.

The restaurant closed briefly in the summer of 1997 for a remodel, and Bormann used the occasion to tinker with the menu. It was a quiet interval in what turned out to be the last stable stretch of the restaurant’s life. On January 6, 1999, Bormann and DeFilippis opened a place of their own — Tuscany Grill, at 4350 East Sunset Road in the fast-growing Green Valley area, in a space that had been Che Pasta — with Che Pasta’s former owner, Michael McQuady. They combined their menus. By that September, when a Review-Journal feature surveyed the restaurant boom in Henderson and Green Valley, the two men were described as former partners at Philips Supper House.

Deale, then in his early seventies and in declining health, sold the restaurant that same year to Martin W. Herbert, a manager with a résumé assembled almost entirely from marquee kitchens. Herbert had run Emeril’s New Orleans Fish House at the MGM Grand, Gallagher’s Steakhouse at New York-New York, Napa and the Voodoo Cafe and Lounge at the Rio, the nightclub Ra at the Luxor, and Rhodes Ranch Country Club; before Las Vegas he had worked at K-Paul’s Louisiana Kitchen and Commander’s Palace in New Orleans, and he held a business degree from the University of New Orleans. He was, in other words, a product of exactly the corporate, chef-branded Las Vegas dining economy that Philips Supper House had spent 21 years ignoring.

The changes came fast and were announced in the newspaper in early November 1999. “Supper House” was dropped from the name; the restaurant would be simply Philips. Lunch, never before served, would begin December 6. A late-night menu was planned for the lounge to catch the service-industry crowd coming off shift. The green wallpaper would go, replaced by a new color scheme, track lighting, greenery and new art; the lounge would be rebuilt. Herbert hired Michael Falduti — a graduate of the Atlanta Art Institute with a pastry credential from Ursula’s Cooking School in Atlanta and line-cook time at Emeril’s, Andre’s French Restaurant, and Ruth’s Chris — as executive chef in December, then brought in Kirk Costello, formerly of Emeril’s and Rosemary’s, who began making stocks from scratch, a practice the newspaper noted was new to the house.

Herbert was careful, in public, to sound reverent. “I want to create the feel of walking into someone’s home,” he told the Review-Journal in March 2000. The private dining booths would stay. So would the twilight menu, whose possible elimination had, he acknowledged, alarmed the regulars more than anything else about the sale. “At first diners were real worried about the change of ownership,” he said, “but we’ve retained them.” He was renovating in stages on purpose: “I just want to make it as graceful a change as possible so that we’re not shocking the loyal clientele.” He described the cooking, memorably, as straightforward, middle-of-the-road power food, and promised to keep the focus on steaks and seafood while diversifying around them.

The ambition underneath the reassurances was a different restaurant. “We’re trying to appeal to a wider market,” Herbert said. “Philips will evolve for a later crowd so we can capitalize on the local service industry market. I know a lot of people who would like a late-night place for something more than chicken wings and chicken fingers. People are looking for a cool, hip place to hang out.” The menu he built reflected it: lobster and crab stuffed shiitake mushrooms at $8.50, oysters Rockefeller Southern-style over creamy polenta with ham hocks at $9, a steak salad Napoleon at $10.50, braised lamb osso buco at $24.95, macadamia-crusted sea scallops at $20.95, lobster Thermidor at $29.95. An 11-ounce filet mignon still went for $24.95, a full pound of prime rib for the same.

He did not get to see it through. By the summer of 2000 the restaurant had changed hands again. A premiere party for the newly renovated Philips was thrown on July 11, hosted in part by the establishment’s new owners — Kevin and Victoria McMullen, and Vicki and Larry Smith — a group of partners based in Oklahoma City. Two weeks later the Review-Journal noted that Philips Restaurant was marking its 22nd anniversary with a full renovation of lounge and dining areas complete, now serving lunch from 11:30 to 3 on weekdays, dinner from 4:30 to 10 daily, and a late-night menu until 2 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays.

The Oklahoma partners were, in their own telling, carrying on the tradition, and one of their first acts was to put “Supper House” back on the sign. Kevin McMullen, the principal owner and a practicing surgeon in Oklahoma City, flew in often. Their remodel went further than Herbert’s: an entirely new lounge described as posh, a video poker bar (gaming at last, in the one Las Vegas restaurant that had built its identity on not having any), and private and main dining rooms redone in warm hues with bright fixtures and original artwork.

In July 2001 the dining room began moonlighting as a theater. A Dean Martin impersonator named Randy Urgola opened a show called “Return to the Sands — An Intimate Evening With Dean, Frank, and Friends” at Philips, running an early dinner performance and a late cocktail show, with Sinatra handled by his frequent California partner Gary Corselo. Because the Sahara Hotel already had a scripted Rat Pack tribute, Urgola went for cabaret looseness instead. “I’m going to make it a revolving door of guest performers,” he said. The restaurant also hosted an interactive murder mystery, “Talked to Death,” on selected nights that August. Two doors down at 4533 West Sahara, the Egg & I had been running its own murder-mystery show since 2000; the block had become, briefly, an unlikely off-Strip theater district.

The last routine notice the restaurant received in the Review-Journal was a health-inspection item in January 2002, reporting that Philips Supper House at 4545 West Sahara had taken zero demerits on a January 17 reinspection and been restored to an A grade — the mundane paperwork of a house that had slipped and recovered. Sometime that year it closed for good. What the address advertised next tells the rest of the story: a “Now Hiring” notice for a Latino nightclub. The club appears to have operated as La Pachanga, under the same Oklahoma ownership that had bought the restaurant two years earlier. It did not last either. When fire officials described the property in December 2004, they said the establishment had closed down, reopened briefly as a nightclub, and then sat vacant for roughly two years.

Philip Deale died in 2003 at age 75. He had been out of the business for several years, but Elsie Lyon, who had worked for him for more than 30 years, said he had told her only weeks earlier that he was thinking about buying the restaurant back and re-establishing the supper club under his own name, health problems notwithstanding. “He was always for the underdog, the underprivileged, gave so much to the homeless shelters here,” Lyon said. “He was a great person, great man to work for.” Van Heffner — by then the president and chief executive of the Nevada Restaurant Association, and the same man who had gone before the county board in 1985 to help outlaw what Deale had been doing — called Philips Supper House an old-time Las Vegas landmark and its founder a fine-dining restaurateur who had given the city a genuinely good room.

Eighteen months later the building followed him. At about three o’clock on the afternoon of December 3, 2004, fire broke out inside the vacant structure at 4545 West Sahara. Crews arriving found what Las Vegas Fire Department spokesman Tim Szymanski described as heavy fire and smoke, and the column rising off the old Victorian roofline was visible for miles. Roughly 20 units and 55 firefighters from Las Vegas and Clark County surrounded the building and poured as much as 4,000 gallons of water a minute onto it. Police shut Sahara Avenue between Decatur and Arville until about 5:30 p.m., backing traffic up in both directions for several blocks.

The smoke drew a crowd that parked in nearby lots to watch. Tamajon Bivins, who lived out near Buffalo Drive, caught a glimpse of the fire on television and loaded her nine-year-old son and his friend into the car. “We got in the car and just followed the smoke,” she said. “I thought it would be something fun to do with the kids.” Crews had the blaze under control in about 25 minutes and kept it from reaching neighboring homes and businesses, though Szymanski expected them to be chasing hot spots all night. Investigators found evidence that homeless people had been sheltering inside, and several witnesses reported seeing children playing around the building shortly before the fire started.

Mike and Theresa Lemmens, who lived directly behind the property, stood and watched the loss of what they remembered as an elegant restaurant with dark wood and romantic lighting. “Now it’s ruined,” Theresa Lemmens said. The Clark County Assessor listed the parcel’s new owner as Hallier Investments LLC, which, Szymanski said, intended to renovate the building into a retail center. Whatever survived the fire came down. The Golden Gate Bridge came down with it. Manrico had chosen his medium because it endured. The only way to get bas-relief off a wall, he liked to say, was to chisel it off.

What survived went east, to Henderson. Tuscany Grill, which Bormann, DeFilippis, and McQuady had opened in the last year of Philips’ independence, kept the old dishes on its menu — the scampi in a choice of heavy cream or garlic butter, the trout almandine, and the scalone — and kept the customers who ordered them. Some found their way there by accident and discovered the past sitting on the menu.

The site itself did not stay empty. Today 4545 West Sahara Avenue holds Rhythms Dance Studio & Event Center, a banquet hall and dance venue that rents its rooms for weddings and quinceañeras and, on some Saturday nights, opens the floor for salsa and bachata until well past ten. The Victorian is gone, and so is the bridge, and so are the booths and the twilight menu and the ex-FBI man at the door. But the parcel that Philip Deale bet on in 1978 is still, on the right night, a room full of people out west on Sahara who have somewhere to be.

August 9, 2026 By Bill Hogan

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