.>The Rathskeller. .(This one has the seediest past)..The filthiest rooms- but still holding onto fragments of its past. Pressed tin ceilings and piles of bottles. .HAULED OUT: A boiler that was as big as a VW. So many wheelbarrows of dirt (from the dirt floor root cellar). Groundhog carcasses (they had been burrowing under the foundation, caving in parts of the walls).-YEARS AGO, we learned from local elderly gentlemen what this room was in the 20s and 30s: a secret gambling and drinking room during prohibition (and continuing into the 40s, since the Madame Anna Beckford Peck and her mob cronies liked to have an outlet for tax free booze, long after the end of Prohibition). She also kept slot machines down here. You would enter through the legitimate front door of the inn, then head all the way back through the saloon, then if you wanted a little more action, you would be escorted behind the bar through a room overlooking the lake, and would lift a hatch in the floor, revealing a precarious staircase that would lead you down to the rathskeller. (This is now the sunporch behind Charlies room…the staircase is still here, under the bed). Down the stairs, youd find a simple room that had been outfitted with a separate bar, card table and slot machines…PICTURED: WI historical archives of some of Anna’s illegal gambling slot machines. Running these machines were part of the trifecta of crime that sent her to prison in 1942. (The other two were running a bawdy house of ill fame & distribution of pints of whiskey concealed in a gutted upright piano.) +The 1931 newspaper reporting on Wandawega Hotel (one of camps former names) as a roadhouse..Weended uprenovating it into2 parts: half is the rathskeller bar/card den it used to be; the other half is a workshop. A warehouse wall we pulled out of a hardware store getting demolished in Fulton market is now stocked with deadstock for repairs. A 1930s nickel a slot machine. Its not good because its old, its old because its good.”..Portrait by:@bobcoscarellitabletop pair:@matt.schefferMore Before & Afters at #wandawegarehabs

April 8, 2019 • Published by Tereasa Surratt