The waitresses had neat little outfits-they had turkey feathers coming out of their suits instead of the little bunny tail.” “A steak was $16 and I made $1.30 an hour, so I had to work a long time to go on a date. “I would bring girls to the Gobbler,” he recalls. The 61-year-old now owns a Milwaukee trucking and warehouse company and has been driving dragsters since 1980 at the Great Lakes Dragaway in Union Grove, Wisconsin. Manesis was a student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the late 1960s when he first visited the Gobbler. He pretty much danced to his own drummer.” “He was influenced to some degree by Frank Lloyd Wright, but he was not a follower of Wright. “He designed a lot of churches in the southeastern part of Wisconsin, including Mount Pleasant Church in Racine, which has received national recognition,” Draeger says. The turkey farmer really had some vision.”Ījango was no stranger to supper clubs, having designed the Fireside Dinner Theatre, built in 1964 in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, where the architect had lived since 1958. ![]() Think of the McDonald’s golden arches with the dramatic, sweeping lines that are eye-grabbing. Clarence was waving his arms and saying, ‘I want it to look like a turkey.’ Commercial architecture is location, location, location-so it was placed on that site to take advantage of the newly built interstate so people would see it. “He was smoking a cigar and Helmut was sitting in the passenger seat. (After the architect died in 2013 at the age of 81, the Wisconsin Historical Society received all of his records.) “They were driving across the field in the turkey farmer’s Cadillac when they had the conversation of what the building should look like,” Draeger says. Hartwig toured the grounds with Ajango, according to Draeger’s research. “The Gobbler was innovative in design because of its unusual uses of circles and curves that in some ways paralleled the kind of work Frank Lloyd Wright was doing at the Guggenheim and the Marin County Civic Center.” “Architects were experimenting with radical new forms of how to construct space,” Draeger says. They are iconic buildings you use to understand all the other buildings.”Īt the time the Gobbler was built, modernism had taken the reins of design. Buildings like the Gobbler that push the edges of popular architecture taste are important. The 1950s and early ’60s were an experimental period of American architecture. “I’d been very concerned about that building. “It is one of the most important midcentury buildings in the state of Wisconsin,” says Jim Draeger, the state historic preservation officer at the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison. But Manesis has saved a compelling piece of architecture. In its new life as a theater, the Gobbler doesn’t serve food, a fact that may disappoint people with fond memories of dining there. ![]() But the Gobbler bar moves slower than the Carousel’s, approximately one revolution every 80 minutes. The 31-seat bar was bathed in purple light and still revolves, like the famed Carousel Bar at the Hotel Monteleone in New Orleans. “This is a beautiful venue,” lead singer Mickey Thomas remarked midway through the group’s set, “and very, very unique.”įrom the stage, Thomas faced the original circular bar, formerly the Royal Roost Cocktail Lounge. In late April, Wisconsin trucking magnate and drag racer Dan Manesis reopened the former supper club as the 435-seat Gobbler Theater with a commanding performance by the rock band Starship. The groovy hilltop lodge, replete with heart-shaped waterbeds, red shag carpeting, and eight-track stereo systems, has since been torn down. Hartwig’s wife assisted with interior design at the restaurant and motel. The Gobbler served the Thanksgiving bird 365 days a year, along with supper-club staples like prime rib and surf and turf. From the air, it looks, appropriately, like a turkey. From the ground, the Gobbler resembles a compact Houston Astrodome. ![]() A Gobbler promotional postcard from the late 60s reads: where central wisconsin meets the concorde age. Hartwig commissioned Wisconsin architect Helmut Ajango, who dressed up midcentury-modern design with Prairie-style elements. Interstate 94 was relatively new, and Hartwig wanted to attract attention to his space-age getaway. ![]() opened the Gobbler, a supper club and motel in Johnson Creek, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Chicago about halfway between Milwaukee and Madison. There was no fork in the road in 1967 when Wisconsin turkey farmer Clarence H.
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