October, 2007
v1.0
Al Nye's bar is a once-swanky restaurant and lounge that has been in operation since 1948.
It seems as if most of the current staff have been there since day one: Sweet Lou Snider is the house piano player on weekends. She is said to know over one thousand songs by memory. Lou was hired at age thirty-one; she is in her middle seventies now. Evie Radke is a bit older still (almost eighty) and has been the restaurant hostess since the middle 1970s. Fran Raymer has passed her eightieth birthday, is still waiting tables, and still dresses like it is 1958. Chicago Mike - with his carefully greased pompadour - tends bar with Phil, Dan, and Corky. Accordion player Ruth Adams (64) has been playing at Nye's for well over thirty years, leading the accurately named World's Most Dangerous Polka Band; her horn player is Joe Hayden (also 64).
Joe Stouffer is the young manager; he began running things when the bar was sold during the 1990s to a pair of brothers who wisely opted to leave everything exactly how it had been for decades.
Nye's has gone in and out of favor with the hipster crowd over the years, but if you can manage to arrive on a night when the Jaeger Bomb crowd have migrated elsewhere, the Nye's experience can be exactly like stepping back into a previous decade... but exactly which one is unclear. It is almost certainly the 1950s or 1960s, however.
Beer was the order of the day last time we visited Nye's.
We'll ask Corky for a cocktail next time we visit, and we'll report on the results.
October, 2007
v1.0
Lee's is an "old man bar" left over from the distant haze of middle 20th century America. Roughly divided in half, one side is the actual bar, which is usually populated with ancient barflies who have been drinking PBR for fifty years. The other side has a stage, dance floor, and tables, and is usually home to the local rockabilly crowd, who have been drinking PBR for five years.
No great cocktails here, by any stretch, but we like this place for good music and people watching in a vintage blue collar environment.
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Last updated on October 23, 2007
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