A few weeks ago I was asked about the wooden church pews that may or may not still offer seating on the pub side at NABC’s Pizzeria & Public House in New Albany, formerly Rich O’s Public House and Sportstime Pizza, where I was a founder and co-owner for 25 years.
Q: Where did those beautiful wooden church pews come from, anyway?
A: Nail City, but it’s complicated.
Yes, there is a back story, as originally written in 2001. Eventually it will be slotted into my ongoing “40 Years in Beer” narrative, but today at “Hip Hops” it is yours to read in advance.
First, a few thoughts in retrospect.
As surreal as the experience seemed at the time, it was never my intention to denigrate the city of Wheeling. As a resident of New Albany, then as now, empathy ordains that one remains keenly aware of the challenges inherent to the process of revitalization as it pertains to a struggling, faded city with a presumably glorious past that didn’t always adapt well to post-WWII economic realities.
In fact I always cheer for reinvention, and it would be interesting to return to Wheeling some day and gauge the city’s progress since my sole visit as documented below. Contemporary Google street views paint a hopeful picture.
As for our encounter with the ad hoc greeting committee at a Wheeling package liquor store, it really did happen this way, and the participants were quoted as closely as I could recall their words an hour or so later, back at the hotel, jotting furiously into my notebook. At 63 years of age, as opposed to 41, it is likely that my interpretation of this conversation would be different. But it was exceedingly strange, and there is no compelling reason to disavow my former self’s sometimes jaundiced outlook.
River City Ale Works ceased brewing around 2004, and other restaurants have occupied the space since then. Much to my chagrin and occasional outbursts of sheer horror, the brewpub warning list that I compiled while writing this essay about the Wheeling trip 23 years ago has come circling back with a vengeance and is (painfully) relevant once more, in 2024, as considered in last week’s column.
Yet again in our nation’s roller coaster beer history, local breweries today seem to care more about their taproom’s mocktail options, ice-cold buckets of Silver Bullet and weekly fingerpainting classes than the quality of their damn beer, which ostensibly is their primary reason for being.
This saddens me immensely, angers me not a little (can you tell?), and Casey Stengel’s question to the woebegone 1962 New York Mets keeps nagging: Does anyone here know how to play this game?
Happily, in 2024 there is at least one functioning brewery in Wheeling: Brew Keepers. More confusingly, across the river in Martins Ferry, Ohio an establishment called Belmont Breworks may or may not brew itself (or contract brew), although it has food, craft cocktails and a social media account that covers the gamut of house offerings … except whatever “their” beer might actually be.
(If you’re a brewery choosing not to tout your own beer, then you must be embarrassed by it, and if I were the brewer, this would imply changing jobs, careers, or both.)
Happily other Wheeling-area restaurants and bars are making better beer options available, and this is an obvious improvement over the situation in 2001. I’m delighted for those folks in Wheeling who appreciate having a real choice.
Finally, and interestingly, it occurred to none of us to bring a camera along during the church pew acquisition expedition in 2001. Our trip to Wheeling occurred prior to the ease of smart phones, and I suppose it didn’t seem worth bringing even a disposable camera along to document the journey.
That’s a shame. Today’s cover photo depicts Reymann Brewing Company in Wheeling (operational from 1847 through Prohibition), from the Ohio County Public Library.
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Welcome to Nail City (2001)
Heavily laden with provisions (Sierra Nevada Pale Ale; maybe there was hope after all), Syd and I exited the package store, where we had been directed because it had the “best” selection in town. It certainly wasn’t the best section of town, and when a raggedly dressed man approached us, a number of potential shakedown scenarios, none of them particularly savory, flashed through my mind. However, he began our chat with impeccable politeness.
“Excuse me, sir… ”
The possibilities loomed like the dreaded sub-sections on an income tax return. Did I have some spare change? A cigarette, perhaps? Would I care to purchase a pharmaceutical from his vast selection, so as to medicate? Or was he a representative of Watchtowers-R-Us?
What’s the frequency, Kenneth?
“We Feature Gallo, Bartles & Jaymes, and Other Fine Wines.”
Fine wines? It must be true; hell, it said so right there in the Yellow Pages for Wheeling, West Virginia, which was another five minutes east from our vantage point at a motel near St. Clairesville, Ohio. It was a late autumn weekend, and it was deer season; as soon as we had made it 50 miles east of Columbus, the interstate highway became littered with dead animals, the carcasses available either as road kill or filling the beds of pickup trucks, uncovered and bungeed.
Mind you, venison is fine by me, but I’m no hunter, and although cigars are an important part of my life, our trip was not a pilgrimage to the former home of Marsh-Wheeling cigars (ironically, they’re now made in Indiana).
We had only one reason for driving from Louisville to Wheeling: Business, or to be more specific, the business of capitalizing on the sad misfortune of certain elderly residents of the city.
Apparently, some of the old folks in question had died, while others had become too infirm to climb the double staircases leading to the second-floor sanctuary of their downtown Pentecostal church. Accordingly, the church had relocated to smaller, more level quarters elsewhere in Wheeling, and a local used furniture dealer was conducting a sale of fixtures prior to the building being put on the block.
Among the items being sold were the church’s venerable oak pews, some six feet and others nine feet long, estimated by our intermediary to be more than 60 years old. Our mission in Wheeling was to relieve the congregation of a baker’s dozen of these pews. On Sunday morning, we were slated to meet the broker at the church, load the liberated pews into a Ryder rental truck, and haul them back to New Albany for use in Rich O’s – another charismatic place where the patrons speak in tongues and gargle snake oil.
However, all this had yet to happen. It wasn’t even 1:00 p.m. on Saturday. We’d checked into our hotel and were searching the yellow pages, not quite in the mood for fine wines like Gallo, but wondering what the local beer scene was like in Wheeling.
Act II, in which the outsider pauses to assist the eager natives.
“Excuse me please, sir, but can one of you read?”
The man waved a sheet of paper inches from my skull as I paused to reflect that it had been quite some time since such an easy question had been asked of me. But what was the catch? Suspicious yet intrigued, wary but accommodating, I decided to acknowledge that yes, since at least the mid-1960s, during some point in the LBJ administration, I have been able to read – quite well, actually.
“Thank you, sir,” he said, “because if you can help me read this, maybe I can get her to shut up.”
He motioned to an indifferent and perfectly quiet female waiting in the shadows by the pay phone. She rolled her eyes toward the darkening firmament, seemingly less afraid of potential violence from her boyfriend than of enduring yet another worthless evening of futility and trash talk.
Seconds later, Tom emerged from the store toting his evening’s refreshment. Right alongside him was my new Wheeling friend’s best buddy, a veritable Sancho Panza, who announced that he had invested in bottled water for himself and a 40-ouncer for my interlocutor, just as he’d been instructed … and here’s the change to prove it.
Examining the man’s sheet of paper, I saw immediately that it was a “VIP Club” circular for the dog track located down the street. He pointed at the bottom of the page, where there were three coupons, each for a complimentary slot machine pull.
Visibly triumphant at his good fortune, having managed to find someone literate who was pliant and reasonably sober so late in the afternoon – quite obviously a novel experience – he asked if the three coupons could be used, all at once, before midnight that very day.
“Well, it doesn’t say you can’t use them all tonight,” I said, studying the various expiration dates emblazoned on the coupons, “so good luck slotting, and have a wonderful life.”
If you will look on the map …
Wheeling is located between Ohio and Pennsylvania in that strange angular panhandle of West Virginia that points northward not unlike a bony, outstretched middle finger. Much of the city lies on the left bank of the Ohio River, but the central district spills over onto an island in the river, where we had been directed to buy beer and counsel colorful local illiterates as part of the bargain.
Wooded hills define the physical character of Wheeling. Towns are wedged into the flat bottomlands between the heights, and to look at the city on a road map is to see an urban area seemingly one mile wide and twelve miles long, poured between in the space between the river to the west and a long ridge to the east.
At one time, Wheeling was called the “Gateway to the West,” then later it was an industrial powerhouse producing steel, iron, nails, glass, cigars and even beer, the latter inspiring these words from a history of the area written in 1879:
To historically review the dawn or subsequent development of man’s appreciation for ale and beer, would be no sinecure achievement, suffice it to say that since the arrival of the earliest pioneers in this section, brewing, in some shape, has ever held its own. But the nutritious and palatable blending of malt and hops found little difficulty in fascinating the popular taste, even our grand-fathers were free to extol the merits of “John Barleycorn.”
Contrary to enduring stereotypes of West Virginia as the hillbilly type of place where squirrel brains folded into eggs stubbornly remain ensconced on the collective dinner table, Wheeling has enjoyed a diverse cultural history engendered by the immigrants who came to work in the city’s factories.
The last names of three pro sports luminaries born just across the river in the state of Ohio, basketball’s Havlicek (John) and the brothers Niekro (Phil and Joe) in baseball, attest to this, as does the presence of Catholic, Orthodox and Jewish congregations to spice the backwoods fundamentalist broth.
But the pendulum never stops swinging. It was well into the 20th century before an expedience borne of economic decline compelled local movers and shakers to reconnect with Wheeling’s southern heritage, and thus with some of the cultural themes that West Virginia’s original Civil War-era secondary secession from previously secessionist Virginia had been intended to forestall.
Nowadays, secessionists and non-secessionists alike are lured to Wheeling with country music and the relaxed ambience of the South, even though the largely outmoded industrial landscape appears suspiciously northern in character.
On Saturday afternoon, driving east on the interstate, we crossed into downtown Wheeling while admiring the city’s graceful, long-span suspension bridge, briefly the world’s largest, which dates to pre-Civil War times.
(2024 note: The suspension bridge has been closed since 2019, after the city was unable to compel truck drivers to observe weight limits instituted for safety, as necessary for a structure designed to accommodate horse-drawn wagons, as opposed to semis.)
Stopping briefly to make final arrangements for the truck, I was struck by the surplus of aging and generally derelict red brick warehouses, victims of the downturn plaguing Rust Belt cities like Wheeling for decades. They’re the sort of buildings that microbrewery start-ups so eagerly sought in the 1990’s, before that particular industry suffered its own “too much too soon” leveling off.
Downtown, in the vicinity of the approaches to the suspension bridge and the epicenter of attempted tourism, several of the city’s old commercial buildings – the banks and corporate headquarters of another age – have been renovated. One of them, at 1400 Main Street, has become the Wheeling Artisan Center.
On the Center’s upper floors are housed West Virginia arts and crafts shops, the folksy milieu of the South and a staple attraction for blue hair bus tours and visiting groups, which the local visitor’s bureau directs for their massed meals to the River City Ale Works on the first floor, where soon we were seated at the bar wondering if this really was as good as it gets in a place like Wheeling.
Comrade, can I see your ration coupon?
For me to have a good life until I could pop the cap on a Sierra Nevada, it meant a desperate effort to remain upwind from my interrogator. Besides, the conversation seemed to have gone about as far as it could, so I started to turn toward the sanctuary offered by our rental car, but he wasn’t finished with me quite yet.
“Fine, thanks, but Jesus Christ, I don’t want to use the damn coupons or play the slots – look, I just want to cash these in and get back the money for drinks. Does it say I can do that?”
Pondering the theory and practice of loopholes, I caught scents of burning leaves and cold river water. Traffic hummed on the adjacent interstate. Elsewhere on Wheeling Island, West Virginia’s state high school football championship game would be starting a few hours later, in the evening.
Exactly what do people drink at dog tracks, anyway?
Why? Why? Why?
In truth, we had been forewarned. Before departing Louisville, I visited the Pubcrawler website and searched for brewpubs and beer bars in Wheeling. There were none of the latter, and to put it charitably, the reviews for the only listed brewpub, River City Ale Works, were mixed.
I learned that the original occupant of the space was called Nail City, an establishment billed as West Virginia’s largest brewpub. When asked about this, the bartender informed us that the current River City Ale Works was the only brewpub in West Virginia, making it the largest … by default.
Unfortunately, her words were not true; there is at least one other brewpub operating in the state, but we had no access to floor space measurements, and it seemed that the first of many brewpub warning signs was about to be raised:
When you spend valuable moments debating ephemera rather than the merits of the beer on offer, you might be headed for trouble.
But size doesn’t matter, and we conferred: Should we stay or should we go? Alternatives seemed few in number, other than hitting the road for nearby Pittsburgh, a scant hour up the interstate, but which of us would drive?
We elected to stay at Wheeling’s largest and only brewpub, the reward for which was an admittedly fine meal and the efficient, friendly bartender who tried her best to be helpful. However, for aficionados of brewpubs, even great food and the best of hired hands are small consolation when the beer is unimpressive.
Here, then, are a few warning signs to consider during a brewpub visit.
Granted, they are specific to Wheeling’s River City Ale Works as experienced during our visit, but equally applicable, in varying forms, to similar establishments.
You become worried at a brewpub when:
- A brewpub’s dining menu lists at least 75 different meals, but only six house beers are described on the table tents.
- Not one of the six “everyday” beers listed on the table tents are available.
- The two beers that are available, neither of which is listed on the table tents, are written on a chalkboard almost entirely obscured by Miller Lite point-of-sale materials.
- The two house beers are unspectacular and display borderline competence if graded on the curve, as served ice-cold in frozen glasses.
- For every glass of house beer the bartender pours, another glass goes cascading down the drains as foam is “poured off.”
- The bartender explains that the reason for the discrepancy between the six beers listed on the table tents and the chalkboard’s two: “Well, we didn’t brew for a while, but now we’re brewing again.” Visible dust in the brew house corroborates this statement.
- You ask why this happened, and she replies, “Because the brewery was broke.”
- The brewpub offers “happy hour” pricing, but a large and readily visible sign reminds customers that the special prices do not apply to the two house-brewed beers that are available, only the guest swill.
That’s right: A brewpub offers “happy hour” pricing for mass- market pet shampoo, not its own beer. Looking around the bar at this “brewpub,” you see that no one else is drinking the house beer. You conclude that maybe you’re strange for insisting on drinking house beer at a place fancying itself a brewery, speculating that your interest in beer is far greater than that of the management, and wondering why such a place even bothers maintaining a brewery when so little is done to nurture and support it.
The overwhelming evidence available to us was that it might be a long time before craft beer becomes a priority in Wheeling, notwithstanding the freedom once enjoyed by the city’s residents to “extol the merits of John Barleycorn.” We asked the bartender for directions to the best package liquor store with the widest selection in the city.
“That’d be Cut Rate over on Wheeling Island. We all go there. Go across the suspension bridge, fourth stop sign, turn right … “
Beer and circus.
Like the waxen set pieces at Madame Tussaud, the tableau outside the liquor store was frozen in time. Roger, Syd and Tom, each with paper sacks of cold beer in hand, with the sun setting to the west, behind our hotel over in Ohio. Standing before us was a man with a sheet of paper. His pal’s arm was extended in an almost Biblical offering of 40-ounce refreshment. Just off stage, silent and impassive, there stood a woman.
In the fading light, the fine print on the coupons was way too small, and my patience far too gone, for me to bother even trying to read it.
“Well, it doesn’t say you can’t cash them in,” I offered. “I say go for it.”
Reassured, the man thanked me a final time and accepted the bottle of malt liquor. The three forlorn bearers of dog track “drink” tickets shuffled off toward their ultimate attempted redemption (although probably not) – to the greyhounds, the denizens of football, and the southernmost extremity of Wheeling Island.
Come to think of it, the woman hadn’t said a word the whole time, just because I could read. I filed it away, and the church pews made it past the road kill, all the way back to Rich O’s.
Roger Baylor is an entrepreneur, educator, and innovator with 42 years of beer business experience in metropolitan Louisville as a bartender, package store clerk, brewery owner, restaurateur, writer, traveler, polemicist, homebrewing club founder, tour operator and all-purpose contrarian.
