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October 10, 2011 · 1:31 pm

Footnote on roadhouses

Is Casablanca one of the unluckiest names a restaurant could have? Granted, there is a fair amount of mayhem surrounding restaurants and cafes generally, at least judging from newspaper stories, but places with this name seem to have attracted more than their share of violent crime.

There is a fascination with the dark side of restaurants, witnessed by interest in revelations of filth, chaos, and bad tempers in the kitchens, not to mention the popularity of such topics as gangster affiliations. This post is inspired by a reader living near Palatine IL outside Chicago, the location of the old Casablanca referred to in an earlier post on roadhouses. He wrote that he would “love to hear about the old-school ‘joints’ that used to pepper the ‘quiet’ suburbs.”

He is not alone. When I recently posted a photo of an old no-tell motel, the Coral Courts, on my hometown’s Facebook page, interest was notable. Likewise someone’s FB post recalling a horrid massacre at a roadhouse called Cousin Hugo’s just outside the borders of that formerly dry and ultra-proper suburb attracted comments like a magnet.

The Casablanca on Rand and Dundee Roads in Palatine was begun by Loretta Cooper, daughter of Polish immigrants in Chicago. She may have opened it in the early 1940s, but under another, unknown name. She would have been about 25 years old and already 7 years into her restaurant career. She started her first cafe, the Star Tavern in Chicago, around 1935 when she was only 18. Being underage she needed her older brother to act as the nominal manager.

Loretta proved to be a “survivor” in the restaurant business, owning a number of establishments over at least a 30-year period. She didn’t run the Casablanca for long, though, because by 1943 she had taken over the old Eddie’s Castle Café on Evergreen in Arlington Heights IL and renamed it Loretta’s Castle Café. It stayed in business until the late 1960s when the building was demolished. She and her husband Edward also ran a place in Arlington Heights called Cooper’s.

Loretta sold the roadhouse to Michael Buny around 1944 and he renamed it Casablanca after the Humphrey Bogart film that had come out two years earlier (thanks to his family member for this piece of the story). In May of 1949 he was killed in a holdup. When two hooded men entered the roadhouse one night with shotguns, he attempted to foil them by sneaking outside through the kitchen and getting a gun, evidently planning to ambush them when they left. He was shot by lookouts watching from the getaway car. Although the police rounded up suspects who went on trial in the early 1950s no convictions were secured. Years later one of the suspects was apprehended for home repair fraud.

Michael Buny’s wife and daughter ran the Casablanca after his death. In 1951, about two years after her father’s slaying, daughter Darlene was shot in the shoulder as she struggled with a tall scar-faced robber who broke into the café one night. It’s uncertain how long she kept the Casablanca going after that.

Quite by coincidence, I assume, a nightclub restaurant opened on Dundee Road in Palatine in the 1980s called Bogie’s, with decor inspired by the film Casablanca. Local history would have made for a riskier theme.

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Tagged as 1940s, Casablanca, Chicago, crime, roadhouses, unlucky names

July 18, 2011 · 7:43 pm

The checkered career of the roadhouse

Before the Civil War roadside drinking and eating places on the outskirts of cities were visited by people who enjoyed making them the destination of a leisurely buggy ride. In winter sleighs full of young people from Boston would go to North Cambridge or Arlington for steak dinners and dancing. Although they sometimes drew a rough crowd, such as the pickpockets and grifters who gathered for cattle fairs and races, these places were generally considered respectable.

As railroads spread across states such as Massachusetts following the war, fares fell and roadhouses drew an undesirable, rowdy crowd. They gradually began to fade away as cities grew. Yet their unsavory reputation lingered and grew more intense with suburbanization in the late 19th century. Minnesota legislated against roadhouses in 1915, and towns around Chicago fought them and often succeeded in having their liquor licenses taken away. Others, however, survived and became legit — for instance Busch’s Grove originally located on the outskirts of St. Louis.

The same reform fervor that attacked drinking (and prostitution) in roadhouses brought new life to them as they were turned into colonial-style “wayside” tea houses by middle-class women in the teens and 1920s. As a writer for Good Housekeeping magazine observed in 1911, these were just the sort of places to appeal to “quieter folks of good taste.” The most famous example, the Wayside Inn of Sudbury, Massachusetts, was bought in 1923 by Henry Ford to rescue it from its alcoholic past.

There were risks in opening a teetotalling establishment in an old watering hole. As the proprietor of a Pennsylvania roadhouse converted into the Huckleberry Inn discovered, old customers had a habit of coming by and demanding their accustomed drinks.

Was this the reason why liquor was found at the Nine Owls Tea Room in Pembroke, Massachusetts, when town police raided it in 1927? The Nine Owls, on Mattakeesett street, was run by Elizabeth Buxton, who had moved to town from Somerville with her family in the 1920s. Had it once been a roadhouse? It is not clear whether she founded the tea room or took it over from someone else, or exactly how long she was its proprietor. In 1932, a year after her husband was struck by a car and killed, she advertised for boarders but I have found no trace of her after that date.

As shown in the accompanying illustration, the Nine Owls eventually reverted to a roadhouse. In this photo, genteel elements from its tea room past such as window boxes, canvas awnings, and flower gardens are missing. A Budweiser sign is prominent. The reputation of the Nine Owls may have been pristine — but to me it has the look of a roadhouse in a Hollywood film noir. Its moodiness reminds me of the image of Casablanca in Palatine, Illinois, scene of a murder in 1949.

The Nine Owls was in operation under that name at least until 1970 when its owner, Edwin Mason, was killed in a motorcycle accident. At some later point the building burned down.