Old Town Ale House

The Old Town Ale House was established in 1958 by a penurious entrepreneur named E.J. Vangelder. He got the idea for the bar from a San Francisco saloon called Vesuvios which was located in North Beach. Vangelder was good at building bars and hiring bartenders. He was bad at customer relations and eventually sold the bar to a poor slob name Joe Diaz. Diaz immediately ran the bar into the ground and sold it in 1970 to a bizarre group of Rush Street eccentrics, one of whom was my friend, Art Klug. (There is a lot more to this story, which means that you have to drop in for a visit.)