Sayonara, Main Bar
A piece of Columbus history will soon be a parking lot if an odious lawyer has his way.
I prefer dive bars. They’re one of the last remaining egalitarian institutions in America.
Dives get harder to find in Columbus the further away one ventures from the Ohio State campus area, which I’m way too old to frequent in the first place.
It’s even hard to find a dive bar in our generic downtown, where out-of-state developers have bribed city council in an effort to tear down historic buildings and erect mixed-used abominations on the ashes as cheaply as possible before moving onto their next victim that still has some delicious blood pumping through their veins.
One iconic bar, on the northwestern corner of Main and High, has withstood the assault of time since opening its doors in 1890 as the Hare and Corbin Saloon.
I’m not sure the exact date of when the building re-opened as The Main Bar and Castle Bail Bonds upstairs, but it’s been around in the roughly 15 years I’ve spent peppering my cerebral cortex with alcoholic spirits.
I made the plunge sometime in the fall of 2019. My ex and I had broken off our engagement and I was back in Columbus living as a single man. I stopped by The Goat Restaurant for Round 2 after the owner begged me to give his establishment another chance after I left a three-star review as a local guide on Google Reviews.
It was another three-star experience, truth be told. However, I made the fortuitous decision to park in front of Main Bar, something I didn’t realize until I saw the iconic octopus-themed mural you see at the top of the article.
It was there I met two strangers, Irish Pete, a fellow imbiber, and Pretty Mary, the bartender. Since that fateful day, I can say these two have become two of my best friends in life. And Main Bar on Wednesday and Friday nights became the breeding ground for those bonds to blossom.
Main Bar delivers an eclectic mix, more-so than your usual dive bar that has its regular customers and the occasional passerby. It’s a bar where you can have drunk judges and lawyers talking in one corner and in the other have a couple of dudes who are down to their last $5 and simply walked from the nearby bus stop to buy two bottles of Budweiser. In between them you could have a slice of life you could hope to find in Columbus.
There isn’t a place like the Main Bar in downtown Columbus, with perhaps the exception of Ringside Café, though that place is usually overrun by state government sewer creatures due to its proximity to the Statehouse.
No, The Main Bar was clearly the People’s Bar of Downtown Columbus, and now it could be bulldozed within 60 days from this Saturday thanks to the actions of Scott Schiff, who is my new No. 1 nemesis in Columbus.
Scott Schiff is an ambulance-chasing personal injury lawyer, which is within his rights as an American citizen. However, he’s the type of injury lawyer that’s successful enough to let his underlings appear in court while he appears on billboards and commercials. His large adult son features prominently on the firm’s webpage despite not attending law school.
This is the American Dream, as I understand it. Get rich enough so you can do the cool shit like look tough on television while harassing insurance companies while outsourcing the actual work to people below you.
This should be enough for one man! Hell, Schiff has enough money that he should be on Titty Island right now drinking liquor out of a coconut with little plastic umbrellas with them.
But no, we live in a capitalist society that rewards the most sociopathic among us. Schiff is not satisfied with his law money and a sinecure for his adult son. His greed got him into the real estate game, where he spent years buying the real estate lots surrounding the Main Bar and turning them into parking lots.
Eventually he weaseled his way into ownership in which sits the Main Bar. Did he try to work out a business arrangement with the beloved historic institution? Fuck no. He tried to evict them in 2015, and thankfully he lost that battle in court.
Schiff’s demanded $5,000 a month rent with the new lease, a ridiculous sum even before considering how much business the Main Bar has lost during the coronavirus pandemic. But even at current rates, owner Jim “Jimmy V” Velio conceded to Dan Eaton of Columbus Business First that he would have to close the bar due to loss of walk-by business and the cramped quarters that make social distancing in the bar hard for any crowd of 10 or more people.
As for Schiff’s vision of the place, well, I can’t say I’m surprised.
From Jim Welker of dispatch.com:
"I'm not in a rush now to do anything," he said. "We're not merchant developers, we'd rather take our time and do the right thing there."
Schiff suggested an arts use or a medical office building might also be a good fit for the site.
With visionaries like Schiff operating in Columbus, it ain’t hard to see why we have a generic downtown with zero culture. Every single building was built to maximize profits for people who don’t live there. It is a ghost town anytime after 5 p.m. And now there’s nowhere to get a cheap drink!!!!!!!!!
The good news, however, is that we’re also not building enough affordable housing or maximizing mass transit. Despite the destruction of a 131-year-old building, the future of downtown Columbus is burning bright for a certain type of citizen.
THOSE WMDs. When one refrigerator is not enough… The sound and fury of Andrew Cuomo… The Cold War bunker that became a dark web empire… Why we can’t make vaccine doses any faster… What happens to your body in Mount Everest’s death zone.