On late Friday afternoon, there were about seven customers at Spanky’s Bar.

Sunday, August 20, 2000

On late Friday afternoon, there were about seven customers at Spanky’s Bar. Chuck Ronquist was sitting at a table near the bar, playing his acoustic guitar. A couple others were singing along. The Second Chance Band, a husband and wife team, would play later to a crowd of between 70 and 100 people.

If the Austin City Council follows City Administrator Pat McGarvey’s recommendation on Monday, Spanky’s, located at 201 Second Ave. NE, will be condemned. Not because the building is unsafe, although it is in need of repair, but because the city would put a parking lot in where Spanky’s and the two city-owned buildings to the north sit.

The city has offered the owner of the bar, Jim "Spanky" Struyk, $62,000 for the property, plus relocation costs which McGarvey said would be a maximum of $20,000. As of Friday, Struyk had neither rejected nor accepted the offer, or told the city administrator that he would like to stay and remodel, an option Spanky’s manager Lou Hansen said had been on hold for two years, ever since the city put Spanky’s at the top of its list for demolition.

Bar patrons are cynical, but they don’t want to see the old bar torn down.

"This is the bar where regular people come," Ronquist said. "They have bars for yuppies and bars for farmers, this is the bar where musicians in Austin get their start and where people like you and I can come. Maybe if we started promoting SPAM down here they’d let it stay open."

Spanky’s and six other downtown bars – including The Brown Derby and Hey Rube – as well as the former Wold Drugstore and other downtown properties were included in the city’s Tax Increment Financing District No. 10, which means the city can condemn any of the properties in the name of progress. The TIF district, which will be funded by the property taxes on the Hormel Corporate Office South on North Main Street once it’s complete, was created for the purpose of "removing blight" from the downtown area.

 

So far within the TIF district, the city has purchased the Wold building and the former Silver Bullet bar, with hopes of selling both to a person or people who would be willing to put up the money needed to renovate the buildings. So far, neither has been sold, although the city has high hopes for the Wold building. If the Silver Bullet building, which also includes the Arcade, doesn’t sell, plans are to also tear it down.

Struyk was unavailable for comment, but Hansen said someone had been in Thursday to discuss relocation with the bar owner. She, for one, is tired of waiting.

"It’s been two years of limbo for us," she said, "like those people out by the airport. Spanky had wanted to remodel, bring back the big windows that were in here originally when the bar was built in 1910 and fix up the exterior, but why do that when the city might condemn you any minute? Everyone just wants to know what’s going on now."

A parking study done in 1996 and 1998 on downtown parking revealed that no further parking was needed and that many of the lots in existence already were underutilized. At a city/county meeting earlier this year, the option of issuing special permits to County Courthouse employees was discussed, but the idea was never acted upon. County employees say the parking lot already in existence north of the Courthouse is nearly empty most of the working hours, although the lot is packed on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights.

"What they call progress may seem like it’s moving us forward, but a lot of the time what it does is erase our past," Ronquist said. "Even if Spanky relocates, you won’t be able to put the history or the associations people have with this place back."