Taverns of the Old West Side

The taverns of the old West Side were home to a post-Prohibition social scene that welcomed people from every part of Oshkosh. West Algoma, as it was often called, was no longer an isolated community of Volga Germans. Two of the city’s most cherished taverns formed a gateway into the neighborhood.

Gordy’s Bar on the left and Repp’s Bar on the right at the east-end entrance to the old West Side.

On the north side of the street was Repp’s Bar. Alvin Repp was born on the West Side in 1910. He was the son of Volga Germans who migrated from Russia. His father had worked at Paine Lumber. Alvin did not follow. He skipped through a string of jobs until September 1943, when he took a loan and bought the Bass Tavern at the northwest corner of Oshkosh Avenue and Rainbow Drive. The Repp family would run that bar for the next 75 years.

The Bass Tavern circa 1943, when Alvin Repp purchased the property. Alvin’s son Alan stands in the foreground. Happy John’s Tavern is visible on the left.

Happy John’s saloon was across the street. It was built by the Oshkosh Brewing Company in 1903. “Happy” John Wawrzinski ran the place for almost 30 years. In 1945, Gordon Guetzkow stepped in. Gordy was born in 1915 and raised on the east side of Oshkosh. He was working as a bartender when World War II took him away. When he got back he got hired on at Happy John’s. Gordy bought the business in 1946. He renamed the place after himself four years later.

Gordy’s Bar at the southwest corner of Oshkosh and Sawyer.

The street names and addresses of the old West Side have changed over the years. For the sake of clarity, I’ll use the current street names and addresses in this post.

West of Sawyer, on the north side of the 1200 block, was the strip. A tight grouping of four taverns and two beer depots. The photo below shows the West Side strip at its peak, circa 1952.

1) Gordy's Beverage Mart (just the west edge of the building appears in this photo)
2) Felda’s Bar
3) Vic’s Arcade
4) The Arena Tavern
5) West End Beverage
6) Wenzel Heinzel’s Tavern

1) Gordy's Beverage Mart
Gordy Guetzkow of Gordy’s Bar bought this property in 1950. It was home to the West End Beverage beer depot then. Gordy pushed that business out and, in 1951, put in Gordy’s Beverage Mart. In the old days, this place was owned by Louis W. Tyriver. A meat market occupied the ground floor. Tyriver’s LWT Hall was on the floor above. Both were icons of the West Side in the early 1900s.

The white building with the extended awning is LWT Hall, which later became Gordy’s Beverage Mart. 1922.

2) Felda’s Bar
This was another Louis W. Tyriver legacy. Tyriver opened the first saloon at this spot in 1914. He sold the bar in 1941 to Henry Felda. a Volga German who migrated from Russia. After Henry died in 1947, the bar passed to his brother Fred Felda. The picture below was taken during Fred’s tenure there in 1953. The lubricated group out front were members of Felda’s West Algoma Brush Club.

3) Vic’s Arcade
This was the old Morasch speakeasy. George Morasch and his son Adam went legit after Prohibition. They called their now-legal bar the Forty-Second Rainbow Tavern. The name came from the celebrated infantry division composed of an ethnically diverse group of Americans, much like the West Side itself. Vic Elmer, who grew up in the neighborhood, took over in 1951 and changed the name to Vic’s Arcade. In 1953, he partnered with Norm Kulibert and renamed it Vic & Norm’s Bar.

Vic & Norm’s Bar, 1953.

4) The Arena Tavern
The Rahr Brewing Company built this saloon in 1912. That same year, a Volga German from Russia named Henry Lautenschlager migrated to Oshkosh. He began running the tavern in 1950 after years of working at Paine Lumber. His son, Henry Jr., was a partner in the business. Young Henry was better known as Wimp.

Fight night, June 5, 1952, at the Lautenschlager’s Arena.

5) West End Beverage
Arnold Wesner moved his West Side Beverage to this spot in 1951 after being booted from his original location by Gordy Guetzkow. Wesner was a beloved figure on the old West Side. He was a first-generation American, the son of Russian immigrants. His beer depot was known for having the best prices in Oshkosh. You’d buy a case of beer and Arnie would hand you a couple of extra bottles to go. He was there for almost 20 years.

Arnold Wesner and a 71-inch sturgeon, February 1955.

6) Wenzel Heinzel’s Tavern
Heinzel came out of Prohibition with his zeal and speakeasy intact. He was among the first in Oshkosh to acquire a tavern license when beer and light wine were legalized in April 1933. Heinzel was there for almost 50 years. He finally hung up his apron in 1953 and leased the bar to Canadian-born Rheinhold “Mickey” Weitz. The place was called Mickey’s for the next 30 years.

Mickey’s Bar, 1969.

The West Side Undone

The first sign of the West Side’s undoing was posted in 1957. The neighborhood’s main street had been called West Algoma Street since the 1880s. That name was lost in a flurry of city-wide street renaming. The West Algoma signs were removed. The new signs said Oshkosh Avenue.

Two years later, Felda’s Bar was torn down. Fred Felda sold his saloon to Mueller-Potter Drugs in July 1959. Mueller-Potter was in the store next door. Felda’s was demolished to make way for an expanded drugstore.

Felda's & Mueller - Potter, before and after. This later became Accu Com Inc.

Oshkosh was pushing further westward now. In 1966, the city annexed Westhaven, a 160-acre housing development cut from farm fields west of Highway 41. It was the seed for what would be the new West Side. And over the next two decades, the old West Side went from being a distinctive community to an indeterminate middle ground. A place passed through to get somewhere else.

The neighborhood had not been designed with automobiles in mind. The intersection of Oshkosh and Sawyer was too constrained. The city wanted to ease the congestion and began acquiring properties in the 1200 block of Oshkosh Avenue. One by one, the old taverns were eliminated.

In 1974, the City of Oshkosh purchased Gordy’s Bar, the old Happy John's place. The building was demolished to create a wider berth at the intersection of Oshkosh and Sawyer. It didn't help.

Demolition of Gordy’s, 1977.

The tight sense of community that set apart the West Side was rapidly eroding. With the erosion came the decline of the neighborhood’s tavern culture. By the 1980s, the disintegration was undeniable. Some of the taverns were falling into disrepair. Turnover occurred ever more frequently. The strip was getting seedy. LWT Hall became an adult bookstore. Vic’s Arcade had turned into Tiger’s Den, an unlikely integration of a strip joint and bait shop.

Clearcutting began in the latter half of the 1990s when the former Tiger’s Den and West End Beverage buildings were torn down. The photo below shows the 1200 block of Oshkosh Avenue, circa 1998, following the demolition of the old West End Beverage. A red car is parked where that building had stood. The bar with the Pabst sign is Den Again, previously home to Tiger’s Den and Vic’s Arcade. This building was demolished soon after the photo was taken (click photo to enlarge it).

At the end of the block was the tavern that Miller Brewing built in 1897. It had been called Mickey’s since 1953. On the side of the building were painted plywood caricatures of Mickey Mouse hoisting a beer. In 1989 Edythe Horn, who then ran the tavern, got a letter from Walt Disney lawyers demanding that the caricatures be taken down. Down they went. In 2001, the city issued a "Raze & Remove" order stating that the building had become "dangerous, unsafe and unsanitary, and otherwise unfit for human habitation." Down it went.

Edythe Horn and the drinking Mickey’s, 1989.

The 2001 demolition of the bar.

In 2014, the Oshkosh Redevelopment Authority issued a blight designation for the site where Louis W. Tyriver opened his West Side social hall in 1915. Its best days had long since passed. The dilapidated building was demolished in 2016.

The former LWT Hall. Burning in 1984 and shortly before its demolition in 2016.

Repp’s Bar was still there and it was still in the family. After Alvin Repp died in 1968, his son Alan took over. Alan Repp made that bar his life’s work.

Alan (left) and his father, Alvin Repp, in 1966.

Repp’s Bar had always stood out among the West Side taverns. Built by Louis W. Tyriver in 1903, the tavern with its eye-catching turret had been a West Side beacon. But the turret had been removed and the tavern was now a prelude to a dead zone. Inside Repps, though, the spirit of the old neighborhood was still intact. Standing behind his immaculate bar, smiling as always, Al Repp was glad to tell you what it used to be like.

“It was really family then,” Repp recalled in 2017. “Lots of kids. Everyone would come in. It was a place for meeting. We had all kinds. Germans. Polish. Rooshins. It was pretty closely knit. There were families here. These were neighborhood bars. There were six bars on this block. They all had their different personalities. But it all changed. Night and day. You can’t compare it.”

Repp's, circa 1949.

The City of Oshkosh acquired Repp’s in 2018. A year later, the 116-year-old tavern was torn down.

March 19, 2019.

All this destruction is in the service of a proposed traffic pattern. A route that allows people to quickly glide through the forgotten West Side on their way to some other place.

The proposed traffic pattern for the intersection of Oshkosh and Sawyer.

There’s just one tavern left to remove.

1226 Oshkosh Avenue, 2007.

This is the saloon built by Rahr Brewing Company in 1913. The building underwent extensive remodeling in 2008, an improvement that left it unrecognizable. It is the last of the old West Side taverns. It’s being taken apart as I write this. Inside was a showpiece bar built for the saloon by Robert Brand and Sons of Oshkosh. The piece was recently removed to Kaukauna by a company that salvages and sells antiques.

The renovated 1913 backbar built by Robert Brand and Sons.

The building will soon be gone. And with it will go the last public space once inhabited by the social life of the old West Side.

1226 Oshkosh Avenue; April 9, 2025.

This is the third in a three-part series of stories.

Part 1: Saloons of the Old West Side

Part 2: Speakeasies of the Old West Side

Part 3: Taverns of the Old West Side

Thanks again to Dan Radig for help with photos used in this series. Thanks also to Jim Backus, Bob Bergman, and Randy Domer for additional photo help.

Contact me at OshkoshBeer@gmail.com to receive an email notification when I publish a new post. Your email address will never be shared or sold.

Speakeasies of the Old West Side

The old West Side was considered a village unto itself when Prohibition arrived in 1920. The Fox River and Sawyer Creek formed a border separating the neighborhood from the east and south sides of town. But there were bridges to span that boundary. What had not been bridged was the contempt held by others towards the West Side’s Volga Germans.

Looking northwest at what is now the intersection of Sawyer Street and Oshkosh Avenue, the hub of the West Side. The neighborhood was also commonly referred to as West Algoma.

The West Side’s immigrant community was German by ethnicity. But they had been living in the Volga region of Russia before coming to America in the early 1900s. Many in Oshkosh believed that George Paine recruited the Volga Germans as scab labor. Paine had refused to rehire the workers who walked out of his mill during the riotous strikes of 1898. The Volga Germans were given those jobs. A schism was inevitable.

Paine’s Veneer mill, circa 1914, at the southeast corner of Oshkosh and Sawyer. The lighter building near the upper right of the frame is Happy John’s Saloon (later Gordy’s Bar).

The street names and addresses of the old West Side have changed over the years. For the sake of clarity, I’ll use the current street names and addresses in this post.

Two decades later, the hostility towards the Volga Germans remained. Their South Side neighbors called them “Rooshins” and “peasants.” The Volga Germans called the South Siders “Bohunks.” The one resentment they could all unite around was their hatred for the dry law. Like most others in Oshkosh, the West Siders revolted when liquor became illegal in January 1920. There were five saloons in the 1200 block of Oshkosh Avenue. Each of them became a speakeasy.

Flooded speakeasy row in 1922. Looking west from Sawyer Street at what is now the 1200 block of Oshkosh Avenue. 

It was an excellent place for a speakeasy. A little out of the way, but easy to get to. The police showed limited interest in patrolling the area. And in no time, the West Side was awash in white mule; the hard-kicking moonshine sold on the street and in the speakeasies along Oshkosh Avenue.

It took just five months for the West Side to become notorious for its illegal liquor trade. The blatant defiance brought federal agents to town. The first place they took down was Fred Brunner’s speakeasy and distillery at the gateway to the West Side.

The site of Fred Brunner’s speakeasy and distillery. Built for Louis Tyriver in 1903, this later became Repp’s Bar, as seen here on the right.

Fred George Brunner was born in Russia in 1885. He left for America in 1909 and joined the others of his tribe on the West Side. He worked at Paine Lumber for a few years before quitting to get into the saloon business. In 1916, Brunner became an American citizen. He signed a pledge renouncing his allegiance to the Emperor of Russia and affirmed that he was neither a polygamist nor an anarchist. Then came 1920 and the dry law. Alcohol anarchism was suddenly all the rage.

Brunner got busted for selling homemade, 74-proof moonshine on a Thursday night in May 1920. In a backroom, the agents uncovered his “big copper” still, several more gallons of moonshine, and several gallons of alcohol from a stripping run ready for redistillation. The feds hauled Brunner to Milwaukee. He stood before Judge Ferdinand Geiger and declared his guilt. Brunner got a $50 fine (about $800 today). He paid up and caught a train back to Oshkosh to reopen his speakeasy.

Brunner was among the Volga Germans whose assimilation was expedited by bootleg liquor. Along with him was a younger generation born in Oshkosh whose parents had migrated from rural Russia. The elders clung to their conservative ways, intent on maintaining their distinctive culture. But their kids wanted to be hip. They wanted to be American. And when Prohibition began, there was nothing more hip on the West Side than a hip flask full of white mule.

The symbol of independence. A Prohibition era hip flask.

Young West Siders congregated on the street, passing the flask, in front of Louis Tyriver’s LWT Hall. The hall was the site of dances and concerts that brought in young people from every part of Oshkosh. The older crowd was appalled. “The stories told by residents of that neighborhood vary, but some of them are sensational in the extreme,” said the Daily Northwestern. A letter to the paper claimed that “the booze flows as freely as water. Young men come with stocked hip pockets, and mere boys of 16 and 17 are drunk.”

Ernst Westphal’s West Algoma Market, circa 1919. The building was owned by Louis W. Tyriver. The upper floor was home to LWT Hall. This later became an adult books store. The building to the left, with a Peoples Beer sign on the corner, was the New Star Saloon. It became a speakeasy run by Henry Gorr.

Meanwhile, speakeasy drinking on the West Side grew ever more vigorous. The feds returned again and again trying in vain to put an end to it. All five of the speakeasies in the 1200 block of Oshkosh Avenue were busted at one time or another. And each promptly reopened.

After they hit Fred Brunner’s place, federal agents returned in 1922 to invade Henry Gorr’s speakeasy. Gorr was another Volga German who came to Oshkosh from Russia. This place would rack up four busts in all during the dry years.

Henry Gorr’s speakeasy under the red arrow, 1923.

On that same 1922 trip, the feds busted Joe Riedy for running a speakeasy in a former saloon owned by Rahr Brewing. This speakeasy was the target of multiple raids during Prohibition for liquor violations.

The former home of Joe Riedy’s speakeasy with the red star, shown circa 1951. The property was still owned by the Rahr family when this photo was taken. As of April 6, 2025, this building still stands at 1226 Oshkosh Ave.

Next door to Reidy was a blind tiger, a bootleg booze lounge inside the home of George Morasch. He was a Volga German who came to Oshkosh from Russia in 1903. Morasch seems to have made enough money selling drinks in his living room to afford a wholesale remodel of his dive. In 1927, he converted his home into a “soft drink” parlor. Morasch was busted again and again. But he remained resolute even after the Winnebago County District Attorney threatened to padlock his door. The city finally stripped Morasch of his soft drink license in 1932. So Morasch put the business in his son’s name, got a new license, and reopened.

The Morasch speakeasy later became Vic’s Arcade show here with the red star.

The saloon built by Miller Brewing in 1897 at the northeast corner of Oshkosh and Fox was also converted into a speakeasy. It was run by Wenzel Heinzel, a hard-drinking Austrian immigrant and longtime West Side saloon keeper. Heinzel’s drinking habit and liquor selling continued unabated throughout the 13 years of Prohibition.

The darker building in the middle of the photo shows Heinzel’s speakeasy in 1922. This was later known as Mickey’s, Mr. Z’s, Frank’s Place, and finally General Lee’s.

On the south side of the 1200 block was Happy John’s Buffet, a former saloon built by the Oshkosh Brewing Company at the corner of Oshkosh and Sawyer. When the nation went dry, Happy John’s remained wet. But ever so discreetly. The Happy John crew managed to elude the feds until 1931.

Happy John’s shortly after the repeal of Prohibition.. Later known as Gordy's Bar.

The dry-law farce ended in 1933. The West Side's outsider status had also ended. People from all parts of Oshkosh ventured there during the dry years to escape the repression of Prohibition. And they kept coming after Prohibition was repealed. The speakeasies became taverns, and the West Side strip became a hub for the city’s social life.... More about that in Part 2.

This is the second in a three-part series of stories.

Part 1: Saloons of the Old West Side

Part 2: Speakeasies of the Old West Side

Part 3: Taverns of the Old West Side

Special thanks to Dan Radig, Bob Bergman, and Randy Domer, all of whom helped with the photos used in this post.

Contact me at OshkoshBeer@gmail.com to receive an email notification when I publish a new post. Your email address will never be shared or sold.

Bare Bones 1895 Bock

The Oshkosh Brewing Company released its first Bock Beer 130 years ago. To commemorate the anniversary, Bare Bones Brewery will release a replica of that original Bock this Saturday at the brewery’s taproom when it opens at noon. 1895 Bock is a rich and malty, dark-amber beer that delivers a warming 6.2% ABV.

This was a beer they were eager to make. The Oshkosh Brewing Company was created on March 21, 1894, from the merger of Oshkosh’s three largest breweries: Horn & Schwalm’s Brooklyn Brewery, John Glatz and Son’s Union Brewery, and Lorenz Kuenzl’s Gambrinus Brewery. The three breweries had already produced their 1894 Bock Beers before the merger was finalized. Those Bocks were released under the pre-merger names of the individual breweries.

The day after the OBC merger was finalized, John Glatz & Son ran this notice for their Bock Beer in the Daily Northwestern. They begin by taking a shot at Pabst for its endless yammering about its award at the 1893 World’s Fair. The Glatz boys then get down to the business of sermonizing upon the high quality of their own beer; something they were never shy about.

By the end of 1894, the three breweries had settled into their new collective identity and were ready to brew some Bock. For the 1895 season, OBC brewmaster Lorenz Kuenzl created a hefty Bock that approached Doppelbock territory. It was a more potent and darker version of the Chief Oshkosh Bocks that OBC became famous for in the post-Prohibition era after 1933.

The recipe for the Bare Bones version of the 1895 Bock was drawn up by Jody Cleveland, head brewer at Bare Bones, and myself. We built the recipe using Oshkosh Brewing Company logbooks and other research into the brewery's practices during the period. No living human has ever tasted the 1895 Bock brewed by OBC, so it’s impossible to say how closely this beer resembles the original. But we’re betting it’s pretty damned close.

1895 Bock will be available on draught and in a commemorative can with a design that includes artwork from the period. Prost!