Culver’s lost restaurants

It’s still the lake water...
by John William Houghton
published in the Culver Citizen Jun 6, 2010

Coinciding with our coverage of last week’s showcase of local culinary offerings, the Taste of Culver, comes this latest offering from John Houghton. It also coincides with the 25th anniversary of the legendary Cafe Max, which will be profiled in-depth in the coming weeks in this newspaper.

The Editor and I have had most of our staff meetings at Café Max, usually under the high school graduation picture of at least one of his relatives or my own. It is a place dedicated to nostalgia almost as much as it is to food. One Sunday this summer, having completed my official duties at St. Elizabeth’s, I was sitting at the counter waiting for my Lo-Carb Skillet and reading the funnies from the South Bend paper, and had a moment of nostalgia for the restaurant itself—or, I suppose I should say, for the M & M, as it would have been at the era when I remember perching on a stool reading the comics in the Chicago Sun Times while my dad chatted with Carl Stubbs. (After almost half a century, I’m not sure whether the Sun Times appealed to me because it was from the exotic home of the Museum of Science and Industry or because the tabloid format was easier to juggle while eating my doughnut.)

Back in 1901, The Citizen published a list of “What Culver Has.” In a number of the categories, we have lost ground. Progress explains some of the losses: we’re down to zero blacksmith shops versus three back then, for example, and have also lost both of our livery establishments, and both of our millinery shops. We have one (snazzily redecorated) grocery store: in 1901 there were four of those, and two meat markets, to boot. On the other hand, we have more than the one five-room schoolhouse of 1901, and we’ve added a public library, and several more churches than the four reported a century ago. But most of all, I think, we have gained ground in the restaurant category: Culver in March of 1901 had two restaurants and two saloons. Today we must have at least a baker’s dozen, and I may well have missed a few.

Some of the present restaurants go back quite a ways, of course. As I’ve said, Cafe Max has roots in sisters Marcella White and Mildred Ditmire’s M & M Restaurant, and, before that, the Grill, across the street. The Corndance, as successor to the Corner Tavern, has been at the corner of South Main for a number of years (older readers will remember when the next building north was a second saloon, The Culver City Tavern). The Original Root Beer

Stand is no spring chicken. Even Papa’s and Sperry’s/ Pinder’s/The Fish Barn/Marmont Cafe have been around for quite a while by now, though I can remember when one was a gift store and the other a bait shop. But—as you might expect—I’ve been thinking about the ones that aren’t with us any more.

The Edgewater today occupies the site of no fewer than three former purveyors of food and drink—The Lakeview Tavern, associated for me mostly with Bob and Katy May, which offered sandwiches, including, if I recall correctly, liverwurst; the DeWitt’s (later Neidlinger’s) Lake Shore Lanes, still famous in memory for its lemonade and what were almost certainly the world’s very best breaded pork tenderloin sandwiches; and the Coffee Shop, owned at various times, I think, by Sytsmas, Triplets, and Onestis. The Coffee Shop and bowling alley were both destroyed in a huge fire on October 21, 1978.

I can remember coming back into town, after sledding on Devil’s Backbone at the Academy golf course, for a cup of hot chocolate at the Culver Cafe, now a vacant lot across from the bank: in later years, after it had become Kline’s appliance store, I helped Chuck Weiger renew the tar roof on the building. The result is that that same place is stuck in my head as both the coldest and the hottest I’ve ever felt. I’m not sure when the building was built, and it was apparently originally a barber shop: but just as a restaurant, it went back before World War I, having been owned by Arthur Simpson, Mr. and Mrs. Garl Cultice, Mr. and Mrs. Leo Butler, and Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Williams (thanks to Judi McKee Burns for her research on this). One of the vanished eateries sat in what’s now an exclusively residential district, at 450 School Street. This was The Barn, largely a student gathering place, I believe: though the Washburns closed it in 1958, which is a little bit out of the range of my own memory. I think the building standing there now is based on the older one: Cutter Washburn points out to me that there was originally an actual barn on the site.

Just north of town, at the corner of state road 17 and 17th road, was The Three Sisters, operated from 1948 to 1963 by the Gass family. The “Three Sisters” of the name were Mary, Dorothy and Norma Gass, and an early menu, pictured on the Culver-Union Township Public Library website, shows the three on its cover. (Urban Gretter, owner of Gretter’s Grocery on North Main Street, was Ray Gass’s nephew.) Inside the menu, the 24 ounce T-bone steak is listed for $3.75, including salad, potato, vegetable, bread, butter and coffee or tea. In the late 70’s, the same building housed Walker’s La Tavola. Farther north on 17—on the far side of Burr Oak—was the Don-Marie Restaurant, owned by Don and Marie Priest, who had operated The Grill in the late 40s and early 50s. This building later became the Fraternal Order of Eagles Lodge. I haven’t mentioned here the Culver Inn (earlier the Maxinkuckee Inn, and the Palmer House before that), with its formal dining area—eventually the Payson Room— and the informal Shack. But these were, in some sense, part of a hotel—the last of the great old hotels that ringed the lake in the first heyday of Maxinkuckee tourism: The Allegheny House, the Lake View, the Jungle, the Colonnade and the rest. That was a different category for the Citizen’s editor back in 1901, and probably a subject for a different column today.

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