The Great American Saloon Series / Louisville's Cunningham's
II, James P. Melling
"The Great American Saloon Series / Louisville's Cunningham's" Scott's unforgettable tale, Ivanhoe, and now he's back to judge the medieval studies competition for THE GRANTSY. And these are but a few of the characters who come to palpitating, pulsating,...
...Knowing many of his friends' penchant for privacy and low visibility, Cap thoughtfully kept the horse stalls in place in the course of further renovating the stable...
...famed burlesque queen, Sally Rand...
...The final, triumphant photograph shows several of the men, glasses in gloved hands, setting out for the Indiana shore, despite the inclement conditions of the day...
...Besides, it was the only opportunity many city officials would have to see the painting of George Washington that once hung in the Jefferson County Courthouse...
...Perhaps because it looked down on traditional intellectual inquiry, the counterculture produced little of lasting influence, as witness the fate of the works of Charles Reich, the most popular countercultural guru...
...and the New York Review of Books, which served as home base for many of its leading writers, has become the most widely read intellectual journal in the country...
...11:1 BOOK REVIEW Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged Christopher Lasch / Basic Books / $12.95 Stephen Miller noth the friends and the enemies of the B sixties often forget that the adversary culture which flourished then was composed of two overlapping yet distinct parts: a left-wing political culture and what has been commonly called the counterculture...
...Not long after, Mr...
...What Lasch offers us in this book, to put it bluntly, is a common species of radical criticism whereby, as Joseph Epstein has put it, "capitalism is like snake oil in reverse: instead of curing, it causes every illness...
...The Phoenix Hill Brewery, in this period of the pencil-thin mustache, was able to provide the necessary libations as well as introduce Louisvillians to the Hoffman House...
...Weigh it...
...Not too many of Cap's friends can beseen holding forth at the front bar these days, but if you are eating in one of the stalls you may well find yourself surrounded by pictures of such luminaries as former governor of Kentucky and commissioner of baseball, A.B...
...And it was also, unlike the left, suspicious of mind, favoring that larger, more nebulous entity—the psyche...
...Buy it...
...Read it...
...A piano was placed in this room as well...
...Lasch's work, which has centered on 20th-century American intellectual history, often suffers from verbal inflation, but thisbook surely cops the Verbal Inflation Prize of the Year, ending as it does with an Orwellian vision of the state's controlling "not merely the individual's body but as much of his spirit as it can preempt...
...As a former captain of police, Cap felt perfectly comfortable with any of a number of socially undesirable people...
...Finally, the menu was enlarged to include what are now the house specialties: chili, turtle soup, and hot browns...
...When The Saints Go Marching In" became the house song...
...Its dark, revisionist views of American history have become standard fare in the academic-intellectual world...
...but if James P. Melling II is a graduate student in public affairs at Indiana University...
...Live it...
...capitalist domination...
...The left-wing political culture, on the other hand, has been very influential...
...The remark "...the ebullient Mr...
...Divide it...
...Add it...
...The next has the same group of men, still on the river, clustered around a large, circular wooden structure which the caption indicates is a saloon...
...Soon to be a major motion picture...
...It was after Prohibition that James "Cap" Cunningham purchased the stable...
...Potter in 1893, the first shows a group of men in top hats and greatcoats standing on the frozen Ohio River with the new "Big Four" railroad bridge and the city of Jeffersonville, Indiana, in the background...
...Melton concluded that what he needed was a fine Pilsener to complement his edibles...
...Soon to be serialized in Newsweek...
...R. Emmett Tyrrell...
...Essentially antinomian in its clamor for personal liberation, the counterculture, unlike the left-wing political culture, was only marginally interested in politics...
...Taste it...
...not merely the public realm but the darkest corners of private life, formerly inaccessible to political domination...
...they had, the symbolic greatness of the act would have passed unheralded in this day and age...
...Established in 1870, four years before Aristedes won the first running of the Kentucky Derby, Cunningham's has had a colorful if not shady past...
...It is said that Miss Polly ran a not so proper but very profitable boarding house until the national sickness was cured...
...He then partitioned each of these into separate, single-party dining rooms...
...Most of them are gone now...
...The sandwich shop flourished, the blacksmith shop closed, and the Congress took a fated step backwards when it passed the Prohibition Act...
...And these are but a few of the characters who come to palpitating, pulsating, percolating, purposeless life in the new Robbins Blockbuster...
...This painting had strangely disappeared from the courthouse the day Cap ventured into another realm of public service...
...has seized the torch dropped by the late H.L...
...Nor is anyone certain whether a gun has ever been fired in Cunningham's,although legend and the holes in the wall by the Fifth Street door suggest that it may have happened...
...Feel it...
...Being a clever and flexible fellow, Melton promptly turned his delicatessen and bar into a delicatessen and soft-drink stand...
...His friends seemed to be drawn from a lot of politicians, baseball players from the Louisville Colonels, burlesque queens, or racehorse players...
...or the very popular former mayor of Louisville, Charley Farnsley...
...London] Daily Telegraph Join the thousands of thoughtful people who read The American Spectator—the magazine Time magazine has called "one of the nation's most energetic and sprightly journals of opinion...
...At this time the front half of the hayloft became Cap's office while the remainder was revamped in a fashion similar to that on the first floor...
...Soon to be a 26-part series on National Public Television...
...Unfortunately, a federal agent caught one of these drinks and, upon sampling it, noted that its contents were not exactlysoft...
...Of course, this is at the expense of one's pride and a typical waiter's barbed wit...
...But by having a Hoffman House at the front bar of Cunningham's, you are able to rest your elbows on a bar that has served some of the most colorful figures in Kentucky's history...
...The old neighborhood has had its face lifted too many times, but Cunningham's faithfully bespeaks Louisville's past...
...Happy" Chandler...
...A Literary Guild Selection...
...Despite lengthy debate, to this day no one is quite certain what prompted an enraged individual to embed two silver dollars in the floor by the front bar...
...Box 877, Bloomington, Indiana 47401 PLEASE PRINT ^ New subscription Name Address City ^ Renewal ^ One year (ten issues) $10 ^ Two years $18 ^ Three years $25 State Zip ^ Payment enclosed X71 ^ Please bill me The American Spectator April 1978 27...
...And excerpts will be among the reading comprehension questions on the Scholastic Aptitude Test...
...The soft-drink stand and delicatessen were unceremoniously closed and the Phoenix Hill Brewery became a cemetery...
...The first owner of the saloon was a young butcher named Melton who bought the old red stable at the corner of Fifth and Breckenridge and transformed the front room into a sandwich shop (the rear half of the building continued to serve as a blacksmith shop, while the hayloft was left untouched...
...Find it...
...Do it...
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...I Please check the appropriate boxes and mail this form to: The American Spectator, Subscription Department, P.O...
...Trade remained brisk with Melton sliding more and more soft drinks down his long mahogany bar...
...Find the square root of it...
...But you would be hard put to find an argument over which species is the most faithful...
...Also, a small bar was added in the rear of the building where the black26 The American Spectator April 1978 smith once plied his trade...
...This huge schooner has since become the trademark of the hearty beer-drinker at Cunningham's...
...It echoes the days when it was possible to visit a barber and not only have your hair clipped instead of styled, but if you so desired have your face shaved by a man who was more comfortable with his razor than without it...
...According to Lasch, both the spirit and the preoccupations of the counterculture, which he says have infected the mainstream of American life, are but symptoms of the "pathology of the bourgeois family," which is the victim of Stephen Miller is with the National Endowment for the Humanities...
...And it would be wholly impossible to calculate the number of hours spent trying to determine the faster of two species: Kentucky's thoroughbreds or Kentucky's women...
...In a sterling diplomatic gesture, they are about to share the warmth of what must be a tumbler of bourbon with their Indiana neighbors...
...But a cigar is a good smoke...
...Subtract it.Multiply it...
...During Prohibition, the old stable was rented to a charming lady who was known to many Louisvillians as Miss Polly...
...Being the gregarious sort of fellow that he was, it was only natural for Cap to encourage his friends to frequent his new establishment...
...Drink it...
...not merely his outer but his inner life as well...
...The flavor of the conversation that has filled Cunningham's over the years can only be detected by spending an afternoon in this brassy old saloon...
...The New York Review of Books, we should keep in mind, has always come down hard on the counterculture...
...It is also quite plausible that very few of Cunningham's patrons have read Rudyard Kipling, but most would readily agree that "A woman is only a woman...
...THE GREAT AMERICAN SALOON SERIES by James P. Melling H Louisville's Cunningham's Cunningham's is Louisville's anachro- nism, having survived more than its share of urban-renewal projects...
...More than a saloon, it stands as an object lesson in the social and political history of Louisville, Kentucky...
...Mencken and applied it smartly to every progressive backside in sight...
...Taken by R.G...
...It comes as no surprise, then, that Christopher Lasch, whose writings have often appeared in the New York Review of Books, attacks the counterculture in his latest book, Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged...
...Nothing better conveys the spirit of the place than a series of photographs affixed to the wall of the back bar...
...Though for the less spirited, tall thin slicks of beer can be had...
...I doubt that any of today's patrons considered moving a saloon on the Ohio River when it froze last winter...
Vol. 11 • April 1978 • No. 6
