Bottoms Up: Wisconsin's Historic Bars and Breweries

This program is brought to you by the combined resources of the Wisconsin Historical Society and PBS Wisconsin. Long before theme bars, before fern bars and teen bars, there were other kinds of bars. And before those bars, there were more bars. Wisconsin is a tavern state. It's something that defines the culture. On this map, the red dots show areas with more taverns than grocery stores. In order to have taverns, you have to have beer, and Wisconsin was a brewing state, too. A lot of the people who settled in Wisconsin came from beer-drinking cultures. Over time, most historic taverns disappeared or were remodeled to fit the times. But somehow, a few remain, and each one has a story to tell. Bottoms up, Wisconsin's historic bars and breweries was funded by the Wisconsin History Fund, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Friends of Wisconsin Public Television. Before the coming of the railroads, horse-drawn stagecoaches traveled Wisconsin's early roads. The bumpy, dusty roadways that connected all of the frontier towns and spaced out along these routes were stagecoach inns, places where people could spend the night, get a warm meal, and enjoy a drink or a game of cards in a taproom. At the midpoint on the Sheboygan and Fond du Lac line, weary travelers could rest at the Wade House. Now preserved as an historic site, the Wade House tells the story of a busy frontier tavern run by Sylvanus and Betsy Wade. When Sylvanus arrived here with his wife, Betsy, and their nine children, he really had his sights set on building a town. And one of the key elements in building a town was the construction of a tavern. Folks that were coming in might go to the parlor to wait for a meal, waiting for the next stage that's gonna pull out, or a gentleman would go across to the taproom. Mr. Wade did serve gin, whiskey, and beer. You could also get a non-alcoholic drink. There was lemonade served here as well. It wasn't solely a place for the taking of drink, but it was also a place where passengers could get a meal and one could spend the night. There are eight private bedrooms off of this main hallway. Each little room has a bed, a washstand with a pitcher and basin, and a chamber pot so that you don't have to get up in the middle of the night and go out to the outhouse. The tavern served not only itinerant traffic, but also was a place of gathering for the local population. Men from town would come in, again, to get a drink, maybe just to socialize, play checkers, kind of catch up on the local news. Mr. Wade did take newspapers from New York, other places. Walls would be covered with notices of maybe local auctions. Being the largest structure in town, it afforded space for public gatherings, elections, or meetings. There may be theatrical performances, and then also dances, cotillions and balls. We know were held on the third floor of the White House. As railroads began to take the place of stagecoach lines, the stagecoach tavern soon gave way to the storefront saloon. In the 19th century, a saloon didn't really look much different than any other store on the street. It had the same kind of storefront. They were typically about 40 feet wide and about 100 feet deep, so they're big, long, rectangular spaces on the interior. And when you walked in the inside of a saloon, you were met by a set of saloon doors and a saloon screen. The saloon screens were architecturally elaborate. They incorporated leaded glass, beveled glass, stained glass. They were beautiful, very architecturally wonderful features. And the intention of the saloon screen was to appease the objection of the temperance people that someone walking by could be exposed to these immoral acts of people drinking at the bar. Women, children, the innocent would see these activities and then they'd be swayed and led off the path of righteousness into this world of debauchery. When you pass through the saloon doors, a back bar and a front bar run along the long edge of the space and that creates sort of a workspace for the bartender so he's not having all the customers mingling around where he's working and it's kind of a defensible space that creates a barrier between the customers and the booze so he can keep an eye on his stock and kind of helps him to control the business of the bar as well. You may find some tables and chairs like you do in taverns today, but many of them didn't have it, they were just standing. No bar stools, people stood at the rail. It was thought at the time that it was more helpful to drink your beer standing up or your booze standing up than sitting down. Next to them on the floor, strategically placed, were some big brass spittoons. A lot of people chewed tobacco back at that point so the spittoons were a place where the excess of the tobacco went. The 19th century tavern was almost exclusively men. It was very much a male space. The only exception to that was if you were in an area that had a high German population, you would have found a separate room there that was called the ladies' lounge that was for women, children, and families. We're going to take a look at that here. This space is separate from the tavern. It's closed off by its own doorway. It has its own side entrance from the streets so women and families enter directly into this space, thereby shielding them from all of the unvirtuous activity that's happening in the tavern. So if you go into a bar in Wisconsin and you see a separate back room with a pool table and a side or a rear entrance, it was probably the ladies' parlor. In New Glarus, Pimple's Tavern, run by one family for 100 years, keeps the feel of an old storefront saloon. The bar was originally built by the Pimple family, Joe and Bertha, in 1893. They ran it until 1935 when their son Otto took over. He ran the bar for 58 years, lived upstairs all that time, raised the family, retired, and then finally sold the tavern to us. So we're the third owner and the first non-Pimple to own the tavern. We bought it basically so that it would stay the same. We didn't want somebody to buy it and make wholesale changes to it that would ruin the atmosphere of it. So we bought it as a hobby. I still work full-time outside of here. And that way we don't have to do the things that you might have to do to generate income, such as jukeboxes, video games, pool tables. But this kind of has become the gathering place for the card games. We have a lot of class reunions, things that require more of a quiet atmosphere where people can actually visit, play cards, talk. Well, usually every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, there'll be the, we play Yas. Well, I got four nails. Oh, my God in heaven. Yas, a Swiss card game that I don't understand how to play. There they are. You don't need those faceless cards to do this. Oh, these are done. Ends in this card. Uh-oh, missed one. I gotta get out. Trouble in the house. And every once in a while, somebody will throw the cards on the table and holler, Sturk! And that must mean the finish or something, but I don't have any idea what it is. All my folks and all their neighbors played it. We were in a Swiss neighborhood, and every time they'd get together, they had a game of Yas. Still playing it. Mine's Ace. Ace? Sure, I figured that was over here. Oh, darn it. Well, the paintings were done in 1913. They were painted by Albert Strubman, who was staying upstairs, because back in the early 1900s, this was a boarding house. Albert Strubman needed something to help pay his 60 cents a day room and board, and he asked if he could paint murals on the wall, and he painted them off of postcards that were chosen by the Pimple family. We have the Andreas Hofer story of Austria being taken away by Napoleon. I'm gonna take that. How about that? How about this one? How about that one? We put a thumbtack through the dollar bill, and we fold it around a 50-cent piece. We let the customers throw it, and we donated to charity. We donated $1,556 off the back half last year. Holy cats, you're mixing drinks? It seems to be more like a home or family here. It's just like the old neighborhood bar. If I was looking at it from a visitor's standpoint, I guess it's just be a cool place to visit if I didn't have to work here, so... Many small breweries once dotted the countryside, fueling a growing number of saloons, and from its earliest days, Wisconsin was on its way to becoming a tavern state. To be a tavern state, you have to have access to beer, which means you have to have good, clean water. You have to have agricultural lands to grow all the ingredients that are used to make beer, and you need to have people who will drink it. And Wisconsin had the perfect blend of all of that. There were all of the Germans and Irish and Eastern Europeans who came to Wisconsin from a culture that was a drinking culture. Soon, hundreds of breweries hauled barrels of perishable beer to local saloons. Early breweries were very, very local places. The brewery was really focused on a neighborhood or a small town. Beer didn't keep well. The earlier beers that were brewed in Wisconsin, the ales and the porters and the stouts, didn't last very long. They had to be drank fresh. In Milwaukee, German immigrants preferred the taste of lager beer. Brewed with cooler temperatures, lagers fermented in caves cooled by ice. Lager beer gave brewers an additional benefit. It stayed fresh longer. It had a longer shelf life, so it was more shippable. So you could brew lager beer and put it on a train car and ship it out of the city limits and ship it somewhere else. An expanding market meant that the lager brewers in Milwaukee, Schlitz, Blatz, Miller, and Best, which would become Pabst, began to grow larger. Fire? Nothing much. Over into Coven Street. Here till they blame it on a cow. A cow? Mrs. O'Leary's cow. The Chicago Fire was probably the best thing that ever happened to Milwaukee brewers because when Chicago burned, it burned all of the breweries in Chicago too. As people came in to rebuild Chicago, that required a lot of beer, and Milwaukee brewers expanded quickly to try to get a toehold in that market. Yes, sir. Nothing like a good long drink of cool beer. Quit joking. Hey, that is beer. Beer? Where'd you get it? They're shipping it in from Milwaukee. That's why Pabst and Miller and Schlitz and Blatz, that's really why they became national beers. At the time, almost all beer was sold in neighborhood saloons, which played an important role in Wisconsin's rapidly developing communities. Many people in the 19th century lived in very modest houses or in tenement buildings that didn't really have any social space. So the tavern served as sort of an extended living room. Saloons and neighborhoods were always community centers, a place where you could go and relax outside of your cramped quarters after a long working day. If you were out of work, it was a place where you could ask about a job. They were a great source of news. That was the communication network of many neighborhoods. So you'd go into a tavern to look for a place to live. Somebody's on hard times and needs some help. The barkeeper would help rally the neighborhood and raise money for causes like that. They were also political places. Tavern owners themselves had a lot of sway in politics because they had their ear to the ground. They knew what people in the neighborhoods were talking about. They knew what the issues were. All over the city of Milwaukee, saloons sprang up to meet the needs of its many immigrant groups. In the Brady Street neighborhood, Wolski's Tavern opened over 100 years ago to serve the local community. This was a Polish neighborhood, and it kind of evolved around St. Hedwig's Church, which is up on Brady and Humboldt. A lot of Polish flats, mostly frame houses. There are quite a few tanneries around here on the river, so a lot of people worked at those tanneries, so a working-class neighborhood. Our great-grandfather started this bar in 1908, and he was Bernard Wolski, so I guess I was named after him. It's a shot-in-a-beer bar. We do make some fancy cocktails, Cosmos, Moscow Mules, 20 bar stools, 5 tables. We offer pool tables, and we've had English darts from the day we opened. Well, the building, to our knowledge, was moved here. It was on Brady Street. We thought it was a dry goods store. They moved the building here with horses and logs. My great-grandfather had 14 children, and they all lived on this property. About this street, Pulaski Street, it's shaped like a hockey stick. This was a creek that did feed the river. We have the tavern on this side, and across was the butcher. Then there was a bakery directly across, and it was a dry goods. So this street was just like its own little community. And there was actually a bar on each end of the street. It was run by my 3 great-uncles, which were his sons, for about 67 years. My brother Mike and I took the bar over from our 3rd cousin, and then my other brother Dennis came in 5 years later. When I first started working here, I knew that I would be a part owner of a 100-year-old 4th generation business, and that's really what kept me going, is just how many people can say that. And I'll tell you, I would not want to do this business all by myself. It can be the best job in the world, and 5 minutes later, it's the worst. The longevity in this bar is because it's been run by 3 brothers other than 6 years. There's nothing like the trust you have with your brother. So many people that come to this bar are just so attached to it. It is truly a community house. Because of the bumper sticker, we're kind of a destination spot. A lot of tourists come in here. And we've been giving out, I'd say, 35 years at closing to anybody that wants them. And after all these years, it's amazing, the stories I hear from people who have seen them wherever they have seen them, from Africa to the Great White North to Alaska, Ireland. It's just, the stories are incredible. If people go on holidays or something, we'll give them extra stickers to Europe or Russia. They're in Antarctica, Afghanistan. We're really proud of that. It's kind of neat. It's kind of a Milwaukee calling card or something. As Wisconsin brewers began to produce ever-larger quantities of beer, they soon faced a big problem as the price per barrel began to plummet. They're trying to get their beer into the taverns, and the tavern owner is basically buying his beer based on price. Who can give me the best price on a barrel of beer? The response of the brewers was to become the tavern owners themselves. If they owned the tavern, then they could dictate the price of beer. This was very popular, and all of the breweries began to buy up and open taverns. At its peak, it's estimated about 85% of all taverns during this period become tied houses, and they were called tied houses because they were economically tied to the brewery through ownership. In Fall Creek, just outside of Eau Claire, the Walter Brewing Company built a tied house, now called Big Jim's Sports Bar. Some of these old wrestling posters I've got with like Nord to Barbarian, and then you've got Billy Robinson over here. Today the walls showcase highlights from the athletic career of owner Jim Gagne. I played football at the University of River Falls with my brother Paul, and I actually went out to the Seattle Seahawks and signed a professional contract in 1977 to play for the Seahawks. Well, I injured my knee after about a year there, and when I came out, I decided to get into powerlifting to strengthen my body, and I won the Wisconsin State Badger Open in 1986. I set a couple records, one in powerlifting, which is a 815-pound squat, and Vern Gagne called me up and wanted me to get into professional wrestling. I guess the highlight of my career would be going to Germany in 1987 for the World Cup tournaments. I got to meet Andre the Giant, 7'6", 550-pound giant, and it was quite an experience to be with him on nights we weren't wrestling and going out on the town and partying a little bit. In 1998, I owned All-American Wrestling. We wrestled in a 5-state area, and that was a lot of fun. I had a good time with it. Eventually I decided to move on, and I was selling my league to a person from Augusta, and as I was driving through town, I saw this bar for sale here on the corner. I got out of my car, walked over, looked through the window, and saw this old bar in the back, and I thought, Boy, this is a pretty neat place. I'd kind of like to get in the bar business. So I called the guy the next day, and I bought the tavern that day. The story gets pretty good, because as I'm at the bar the first day, cleaning it up, getting ready to open up, this older lady comes in, and she says, Are you related to a Walter Brewing family? And I said, Yeah. My grandfather used to own a brewery here in Eau Claire. She goes, Didn't you have an uncle named John Walters? I said, Yeah, I've got an uncle, and I had a great-great-uncle named John Walters too. She says to me, Hey, they bought the land and built the bar here. I go, Really? I was just amazed at the fact that I stumbled into this place by accident, and my great-great-uncle actually started it up. You know, there were dirt roads here. Basically there was nothing from here to Eau Claire, which is approximately 8 to 9 miles away, and he used to deliver the beer on horses, and it must have been quite a scene to see, you know. In Jefferson, the saloon on this busy corner was rebuilt by brewer Rudolf Hager to serve as a tide house for the Hager Brewery. Now known as the Landmark Saloon, the pride and craftsmanship are still on display, with Rudolf Hager's initials carved right into the back bar. It was built by the brewery as a showplace for their own beer, so it's much more ornate and elaborate than your typical neighborhood corner tavern. It has this beautiful stained glass window here with leaded glass around the outside. In the center there's a medallion with a crest of the Rudolf Hager Brewery. You can see the R and the H and hop leaves in the center of the field. It has a magnificent, very large-scale back bar built out of coarse-sawn oak, magnificent front bar with foot rails, marble baseboards, wainscoting on the walls, ceiling is coffered ceiling. It's just a showplace of a tavern. Breweries could spend a lot more money on a tavern than a normal tavern owner could, so taverns got a lot more elaborate as a result of the Tide House movement. In Burlington, B.J. Wenker competed with the Tide Houses by building an elegant saloon, now preserved as a restaurant that still bears his name. B.J. Wenker's is an upscale saloon for the period. It has a lot of features that are pretty embellished. It has an encaustic tile floor that's richly patterned with medallions set in the floor. It has subway tile, wainscoting on the walls, decorative tin ceiling, and a very rich oak back bar and bar front. The bar fixtures were produced by the Brunswick Company, which was the largest maker of back bars. Brunswick got it to start making pool tables, and they realized they could sell a lot more pool tables if they sold it with all of the furnishings for a tavern. This bar has an incredible complement of all of the original bar fixtures and furnishings. It has the typical front bar and back bar that we see in many Wisconsin taverns, but it also has kept its liquor cabinets, cigar humidor, the icebox, and what we see right here, set apart from the bar, is a short lunch counter where every day B.J. Winker set out a buffet of free food at lunchtime. Pickled eggs, pickled pork hocks, sausage. The temperance movement agitated for bars to start serving food because they thought if people had full stomachs, they wouldn't drink as much. But ironically, it backfired for the temperance movement because bars filled up at lunchtime with a lot of working-class people, for which this was the biggest meal of the day, and you could get it for the price of a glass of beer. The power of the big brewers and their tide houses promoted a drinking lifestyle in an already alcohol-drenched culture. The reputation of saloons became tainted due to excesses, what was called a devil's trinity of drunkenness, prostitution, and gambling. There's a constant tension between the forces of moderation and the forces of the good life. Since frontier days, temperance groups fought against the sale of alcohol, motivated by the costs imposed by drinkers on the rest of society. Former Janesville resident Francis Willard led the Women's Christian Temperance Union in its campaign against the damaging effects of drinking on families. I'm so lonesome for you. The sentiments of temperance advocates were spelled out in Ten Nights in a Barroom, a novel turned into a highly popular play and film. You're a thief! Don't call me a thief! You're a thief! Thief! The tireless efforts of prohibition groups resulted in Wisconsin ratifying the 18th Amendment, banning the sale of alcohol. Prohibition was an unmitigated disaster for tavern owners and for brewers. With the stroke of a pen, they took away the 5th largest industrial business in the city of Milwaukee. Over 9,500 Wisconsin saloons closed or became soda fountains or pharmacies. But in some areas, saloons continued to operate despite enforcement of the law. Early, spectacular raids slowed but never stopped the sale of alcohol from the many bars lining the Main Street that had changed from saloons to soda fountains. Prohibition had little effect on Hurley. Hurley was never dry. Hurley always has had a lot of bars. It was a place where the miners came at first with no wives. And when I was a young man, it was quite a lumbering town. So we had a lot of lumberjacks. These were underground mines, and the tunnels needed to be shored up with timbers so that the mining company contracted with many loggers to supply the mines with this type of lumber. And of course, then the bars opened up and the girls came and the dance halls and so on, that sort of stuff. You can see the old movie Come and Get It, which was Edna Ferber's novel about Hurley and the logging industry. A block away from us, you're in Ironwood, Michigan. They always had strict laws on booze and liquor. Most people that lived around the range and wanted to go drinking came to Hurley, Wisconsin because it was a more wide-open town. At the peak, we had around 88 bars. The tavern Don's Never In opened in 1925. That'd be 5 years into Prohibition. Opened as Santini's Hotel, and the Santini family installed one of the most beautiful back bars in Wisconsin. Still intact today, built by Brunswick, mahogany, triple arches. The back bar is Art Nouveau style. You can see the curlicues with the flowers, the plant leaves, and the carved heads of the winds. Dr. Gresham bought this place, and his wife, Don, was a little bit teed off. She said, You'll never see me in that. So he named the place Don's Never In. He wanted to save the beautiful back bar. He thought it would have been sent to California in pieces, and there goes the history, which I agreed to. 8 months later, if the bar, which is 10 feet high, could have fit in our home, I don't think we'd be having this conversation today. I don't. No. The main street is Silver Street. It's 4 blocks long, and it slopes toward the river. This building is part of the section called the Lower Block. Lower in every sense of the word. Lower morality, etc. They had grills upstairs, and they had gambling downstairs. Upstairs, it was a hotel by the hour. Down the hall is 13 rooms that were used for salesmen. That's what I was told. And each room has a little buzzer on the door for... I'm not sure what. And one bathroom for all of them. This particular bar's draw was that it was a gambling place. And if you go downstairs, you see that there's a hole in the wall looking out at the poker players to see that nobody was cheating. And the money was kept in the back, and the big money went through the opening in the wall. This bar is perhaps the last one that remains fairly authentic to what it originally was. There's still a lot of places on the main street, but they've been remodeled and names changed. Some have burned down, and some have been redone. And so this is perhaps a representative example of what we had in Hurley in the old days. During Prohibition, early tourists made their way up to northern Wisconsin, where taverns were built to serve them in a rustic style. The rustic Northwoods-style architecture is really based on a long-standing nostalgia and an interest in frontier cabins and logging camps and the lure of the Northwoods. Outside St. Germain, Sister's Saloon preserves the rustic look of an old resort, restaurant, and bar. Sister's Saloon got its start in the 1920s as more and more tourists headed north. They used this Northwoods rustic architecture to attract people. Inside, the walls had the color of a crackling fire. The bar, the cabinets behind, were created by a craftsman who peeled little twigs, split them in half, and arranged them in a really unique and original design. It's just one of the places that people like to stop because it's very Northwoodsy. The newer places are fun too, I mean fancier, but this is a typical Northwoods place here that people like to come and look at. Log structure, not easy to heat, but it's nice to look at. It was always called Peacock Lodge, and I'm told the original owner of the place worked in the southern part of the state for a meatpacking company called Peacock Hams, and that's why he named it Peacock Lodge. In the 70s, my boyfriend's parents used to own the tavern here in the restaurant, and I used to ride my horse down to visit with the boyfriend and stuff back in the 70s. And then my sister had moved back home here. We heard that the previous owner was thinking about selling, so we came and talked to him, and the rest is history. I'm on a lake called Fawn Lake, and it runs into Big Saint Germain Lake and also Lake Content, so I get a lot of lake traffic. The fishermen and the boaters and skiers come up to come and have lunch or dinner or something with us. I have people from years ago that still have to stop and see the place that honeymooned here maybe back in the 40s or 50s, and we'll take a ride up north to come see the old place. Again, they used to stay, because this was all a big resort at one time. There was a lot of logging going on back in the 20s up here. I don't know where the original builder happened to be from. He built several other restaurants in this area too in Saint Germain back in the 30s. Behind the bar, it had to be all done by hand. I don't know if they had to split the logs, but they're smaller. I mean, it must have taken a lot of work. I'm sure it took them a lot of work. I took woodworking in school, I couldn't do that. In 1933, the disaster of Prohibition ended for brewers and taverns, setting off celebrations across the state as beer and bars came back. It had been a long haul for brewers large and small, which did what they could to survive. Schlitz made candy bars, Pabst made malted milk. One of 73 brewers to survive Prohibition, the Potosi Brewery first opened in 1852. After Prohibition, it grew to serve a regional area before closing its doors in 1972. Potosi was one of many little breweries in Wisconsin that fought a good battle for a long time and then finally went by the wayside. The Potosi Foundation recently brought the building back to life. Housing a brew pub and restaurant, the old Potosi Brewery also houses the National Brewery Museum, telling the story of Wisconsin brewing through artifacts of the industry. The idea of the museum is that our members can exhibit their collections. I was intrigued with the artwork on the labels and so forth and with the history of the breweries, so I started collecting beer bottles. Some of them started collecting cans, some of them with bottles. But gradually, other people recognized the artistic aspect of these things, and they started collecting. Before you know it, it'd become a nationwide obsession. We have a cross-section of things from the larger breweries in Milwaukee to the very obscure little breweries in the small towns. It was a competitive business, and they had to advertise. A lot of this stuff was before radio and television, and some of it had very great artistic merit. And this is, of course, one of the things that attracted the collectors to these items because they're colorful, they have local color, they have historical background and impact. Up above here, there are 2 wooden cases from Semerod & Push Brewery in Highland, Wisconsin, which is a little town north of Platteville. The brewery went out of business in 1942. The case is an illustration of some of the breweriana that Semerod & Push put out during the years. A 1904 calendar that shows the bottling house and it shows the brewery. And another promo piece from there would have been a nice reverse on glass piece illustrating one of their prime brands, which was called Old Regulator. And then we have some items such as John Groff's Milwaukee Weiss Beer, for instance. Weiss Beer was the pre-soft drink beverage for women and children. There's a millions porcelain sign that would have hung outside a tavern, double-sided. You can see Marshfield Brewery, which of course has been closed for years. You'll see there's corner signs that would have hung outside of a tavern. Well, for us that managed the operation, it's a real pleasure to do that because when we're here, it's an environment, you know, among the things that we love, and we hope that many other people can enjoy the same experience. When bars came back after Prohibition, they operated under a stricter set of rules that banned using the word saloon in a bar's name. There's a strong idea that they didn't want to go back to the lawless saloons of the past. A new addition, barstools, gave a seat to a new clientele, women, who first began frequenting the Prohibition bars called speakeasies. When the speakeasies come about, all bets are off. Everything is changed because there are no longer any rules whatsoever, so women can come into the speakeasies and commune with the men in a way that they never could in the saloons of the past. It attracts young women flappers who cast off those Victorian trappings of their parents, and there's a cocktail culture that develops in the speakeasies because they need something to mask the taste of that rotten bathtub gin. So sweet cocktails become a vogue, and women start drinking cocktails. Many of the new bars sported a different look from the old saloons of the past. After Prohibition, it's a blank slate. The designers of taverns are free to do whatever they want, and they take their inspiration from movie sets of the period. The Busby Berkeley musicals with all of these dancers, they can't have anything that's very intricate, so they have these very simple, bold, sweeping patterns that looked good on film, but it also made for kind of striking sets inside of the taverns. They start introducing curves into the design, lots of geometric shapes, circles, and long bands of lines. A rare survivor of the era, the Casino Bar in La Crosse reflects some of the design changes in bars. The curving booths that we have in here, the very streamlined corners on the bar and the back bar, the strong chevron zigzag pattern on the canopy over the top of the bar, the real bold contrast of materials and colors, and they're slick and clean and smooth and bold, and they don't have any of that very opulent ornament that saloon architecture had. The casino's a classic cocktail bar. It's meant to appeal to kind of that smart set of people serving more upscale liquor. It's not just a shot and a beer. They're serving mixed drinks and cocktails. They have to accommodate a couples trade that never existed before, so offering booths where couples could get together with other couples and be able to talk over the top of a table was an innovation to try to capture that couples trade. The casino had a lot of fun with the idea of jazz-age naughtiness being kind of speakeasy-like in the legal era of liquor. The casino also reflects this irreverence in the marketing of the casino too. Their tagline for the tavern So they're setting this expectation that when you come here, it's not a typical kind of upscale bar. It's a little naughty and a little odd and a little eccentric. Bryant's, Milwaukee's first cocktail lounge, shows little sign of the old neighborhood bar it used to be before remodeling by owner Bryant Sharp. There was an old stove, and it was very tavern-like. He got tired of the neighborhood crowd coming in and ordering a beer, sitting there and telling their problems as the story goes, so he closed the place up and completely remodeled it into a cocktail lounge, played nothing but classical music. A pretty drastic change for the times. He would ask what you wanted and then he would tell you, you don't want a beer, you don't want a shot, you want one of our drinks, and that's how the cocktail thing began. And the pink squirrel, the banshee, and the blue-tailed fly was originated by him, which are all ice cream drinks. The most famous drink he invented was the pink squirrel. All right, so there's the pink squirrel. That's my dinner. When Bryant Sharp passed away, Pat Malmberg carried on the vision, still used today, of offering hundreds of cocktails... I can just make you something if you'd like. ...with no menu, in a dimly lit atmosphere. A lot of people would come in and make the remark, when are you going to pay your electric bill or turn up the lights, and this is it. We have over 400 unique drinks that were invented either by Bryant or Pat or one of the bartenders. Jimmy was here 36 years. Dennis was here 36 years. So it was like a family, and I just never left. I just stayed. This is a list of about 250 of our recipes, and the way we get people to figure out what they really want is to ask them a series of questions. Do you want something sweet, sour, bitter? In 1971, a devastating fire swept through and destroyed much of the bar. Oh, the place downstairs was completely gutted. The upstairs was smoke-damaged. And within 3 months, Pat had the whole place reopened. The cash registers are plated in gold, the Macintosh is plated in gold. It's a one-piece, three-tiered bar, which you don't see anywhere. It was custom-built for the place. Everything was custom, the vibe and the wallpaper and the sound system, it's amazing. It's a bar, and it's definitely a bar. It's a drinking establishment, but it's also almost a museum. So much history and so much tradition here that it's just wonderful. Sometimes I feel like a curator more than a bar owner. Cheers, man. Thank you. It's a good bar. It's a good day. As Wisconsin suburbanized after World War II, the big brewers stepped up their marketing efforts, sponsoring sports teams, and getting into the new television market to build national brands. The big brewers also began to move away from taverns by aiming at the home market and selling beer in bottles and disposable cans. And once there were beer cans, it meant that beer became a commodity that began to be sold in grocery stores and other places, and taverns started losing a lot of that off-site sales that was such a big part of their market. The brewers also promoted sales of bottles and cans because they realized that getting people to drink at home would be part of the way to safeguard the breweries from prohibition happening again. Bring it into the household, where family morals can help moderate some of these ill effects of drinking that were unmoderated within the tavern. So you see a lot of imagery of the housewife serving her husband a glass of beer, of the husband and wife both sitting down together having a beer in the living room. In the suburbs, zoning laws meant that bars were no longer located in neighborhoods, but instead along commercial strips where they competed for attention. As people become more mobile, how do you attract somebody to your tavern? Well, try to come up with something novel. Try to come up with something that the other tavern doesn't have. Lots of them hooked on to dramatic or popular themes of the time and found ways to set themselves apart. In Rochester, outside Waterford, the DMZ Bunker serves as a VFW post that acquired decommissioned military equipment through a government program. That's an M60A3 tank. It has a 105 barrel on it. It weighs about 106,000 pounds, and it was heavily used in Vietnam and after. I've always wanted to do something with a military motif. I've kind of been military most of my life. This is an A7 Corsair. It flew about 90,000 missions, jets of that style, in Vietnam. I talked to a couple of friends of mine, an Army veteran and a Marine veteran, and we decided, yeah, we're going to do this. This is a T-33 trainer, they call it. It's a two-seater. That's how they trained the pilots to fly. This was our first jet used in Korea. The Cobra attack helicopters, Vietnam era. Somebody passes away, their son or daughter-in-law, or somebody will bring in, and my grandpa had this in the basement, and they'll bring it in, and we hang up what we can. It's a mix right now. There's a lot of World War II, a lot of Vietnam, some Korean, and we're just starting to get into Iraq. A lot of nice things. So we just hang up everything we get our hands on. No method to it. If we have room, we put it there. International exports. If you know the password, quietly whisper it in my ear. If you don't have the password, we can't let you in. Incorrect verb. So do you think you know? I'll give you a try. We can't get in, but we never turn away anyway. I just need you to pass an undercover mission in order to gain entry. When you're on the run, you really need a safe house. Control told us to set this one up in Milwaukee because spies had to have a place to stop for a little R&R. So that's how it all started, and it's been going since 1966. This is kind of a museum now. We have pictures here from the old Soviet Union. In fact, we have an oil painting of the godfather of the KGB, Felix Jasinski, and we have a whole CIA collection from the Cold War, and we have a cell door from the Stasi interrogation prison in East Berlin. I believe you may be a double agent after all. As long as there's two countries, there'll always be espionage. So when you come into the safe house, you have diplomatic immunity, and so everybody can relax, have some wonderful food, and enjoy themselves, and what's whispered at the safe house stays at the safe house. And by the way, you can't show this to anybody. Yeah, don't show this to anyone. It's a secret place. Nobody's supposed to know it's here. Right. Another bar with no sign outside, the Joint in Eau Claire, enters its 5th decade without an obvious theme. But the walls tell the story of a time when the Joint served as a small and unlikely venue for legends of jazz, blues, and folk music. I was sitting over in this other corner, which we now call the Blue Room, although it's not blue anymore, but there used to be a point beer sign in here that was blue. So anyway, we were over there, and Ahmad Jamal came up on my jukebox, and I said, let's get this guy. So Ahmad Jamal came here, and it was terrific. And I didn't have any PA or anything. We rented a piano. And right in the middle of it, it occurred to me, I gave the tickets away, that it was a really nice thing to do. And I thought, if we could just do this, we'd sell maybe 6 or 8 or 10 times a year at the most, called them the Joint Breakeven Concerts. Well, that was a hell of an idea, only we never broke even, ever. So for whatever, from 74 to 91, I spent about every dime this place took in on music. So over that course of time, we had everybody here, jazz and blues and folk music. And so Dizzy Gillespie played here, and Charles Mingus played here, and Woody Herman's band played here, and Stan Kenton, McCoy Tyner, Willie Dixon, and Herb Ellis. It was like church in here, no noise. We didn't even ring the cash registers out. Dave Van Rock was here, and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee were here, and Ramlin' Jack Elliott was here. Gary Burton was here with Pat Matheny, and the blues guy, Sun Seals, John Lee Hooker. And then the phone company called, say, your phone's off the hook. I said, lady, please, it's gonna be off the hook for about another hour and a half. Well, you know, if you want a phone, there's no point in paying it off the hook. And I got Charlie Byrd and the Great Guitars or somebody playing here, and I say, lady, come on. And that's Phil Woods, and that's Jerry Mulligan. There's no money in doing music, especially if you do something that's really good. There's no money. People said, well, why don't you get this guy? I said, well, I don't like that guy. They said, well, I don't think he's any good. They said, well, you might make some money. I said, oh, great, I know what I'll do. I'll start having some shows that I don't like the players. That doesn't make any sense. When the Mercer Ellington Orchestra was here, they played here, and then they played Lambeau Field the next night. Here's Eddie Harris right here. And there's Jack Elliott, and that's Mimi Farina, and there's Dizzy, and Bill Evans was here 2 nights. There's Mingus right there, and Odetta, and Freddie Hubbard, Ernie Watts, Bobby Hutcherson, and Thad Jones, Mel Lewis, Jack McDevitt, Dave Holland, and Sam Rivers, and I could go on. I think we did 167 shows or something, and I'd spent all the money this place made. The joint didn't have a penny in the bank, and I thought there are no old folks homes for club owners. Let's put some money in the bank. So I stopped in 94. It was a very expensive hobby and worth every penny of it. And it's sad, but it's okay. Since Prohibition, the brewing industry consolidated with the biggest breweries, the most successful, able to brew on a large scale and create memorable ad campaigns. It tastes great! See, I'll carry it down! Oy, all right, it's less filling. About 70 brewers survived Prohibition. By the late 1950s, there were about 37 Wisconsin brewers left. By 1975, there were 8 of them. Four were giants of the industry, Hapst, Miller, Schlitz, and Heilemann, all ranked in the top 10 nationally. But the fortunes of some of the smaller breweries were about to change. In Chicago, syndicated columnist Mike Royko, who harshly criticized the national beers, arranged for a blind taste test. In a surprising result, the top three American beers, Point Special, Walter's Old Timers, and Huber Premium, came from Wisconsin's smallest brewers. Royko's article provided a shot in the arm and a lot of free publicity for small Wisconsin brewers just when they needed it. In 1978, Newsweek magazine declared Leinenkugel's the best local beer in America. That same year, President Jimmy Carter signed a bill that loosened restrictions on home brewing, unleashing a wave of innovation. People start experimenting their basements, their garages, their kitchens, with all sorts of different ingredients and different mixes. They go back to the old recipes of the past. When Deb Carey started New Glarus Brewing with her husband Dan, she became the first woman in the U.S. to found a brewery. We're really tired of the corporate life and just desperate to come back to my home state and raise our very young daughters. Deb took a map of Wisconsin and with a compass drew a 30-mile radius around Madison, and so I rented a car and I drove around, which is kind of crazy, and stumbled upon New Glarus, and there was a warehouse here that was empty. The guy who owned the abandoned warehouse came on as our first investor and traded me stock for occupation of the building. One of the pioneers of what are called craft breweries, New Glarus created dozens of varieties over the years. Most popular is Spotted Cow, brewed from a recipe steeped in Wisconsin history. We're big fans of Old World Wisconsin. We love to go out and walk around. It's basically a working museum, outdoor museum, and we went out to the German village, and there was a crock covered with cheesecloth and beer fermenting, and I thought, you know, I wonder what that beer would have been like, and I imagined how the beer would be made. It would be made with local barley, it would be made with imported hops, it would be made with ale yeast, it would be made with local corn, and it would be unfiltered. That's how we came up with the design for the beer. Craft beers created a new market niche for small brewers and scores of breweries and brewpubs once again dot the state, producing hundreds of distinctive beers. While many small brewers have flourished, Wisconsin taverns haven't fared as well. From World War II to the 70s, the number of bars went down by half and have continued a steady decline since then. Mom-and-pop owned bars have really declined, and there's a lot of turnover and a lot of change in taverns. Part of that is attributable to changes in attitudes related to drinking and driving. It's more expensive to have a license to open a tavern today, and as a result of that, it's not an easy start-up business. But the number of Wisconsin bars remains one of the highest in the country, and taverns continue to play a role in community life. It's much more part of the social fabric than it is in other places. Families, couples, children, extended families all come to taverns, and it's always been that way. It's that everybody's living room kind of function that the tavern has that really is why taverns are still around today, because they serve the same purpose that they did 100 years ago or even 150 years ago. People in other states drink in their homes, they drink in other gathering places. In Wisconsin, people get together in taverns, and that's why Wisconsin is a tavern state. Bottoms up! Wisconsin's Historic Bars and Breweries was funded by the Wisconsin History Fund, supported in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Friends of Wisconsin Public Television.