Enter the Vollrath

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Brian Alvey was working in his basement office at the Vollrath Tavern one night, not long after he bought the place, when he heard three distinct footsteps on the floor upstairs. The hardwood is resonant, so sound carries throughout the 80-year-old building when people are shuffling about. But Alvey heard those three steps at 4:30 a.m., when he was alone, behind lock and key.

“I carry concealed everywhere I go for the most part and I cleared the whole up− stairs no different than if I was in a hostile third-world country,” says the 18-year veteran of the U.S. Army, Army Reserve and National Guard. “I cleared that place twice and I couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that I didn’t find anything.”

Phantom footsteps, a large bar-back mirror that allegedly cleans itself, and mysterious lights and shadows — they’ve all been experienced by Vollrath employees and patrons. Alvey went so far as to allow a group called Researching Indy’s Paranormal to stay overnight in April. The bar owner doesn’t believe in spirits — “The only ghost I believe in is the Holy Ghost” — but even Alvey can’t argue that the bar itself is experiencing a kind of life after death as a grassroots live music venue, and Indianapolis’ first real buzz bar.

On May 12, Canadian electropop group Woodhands was booked to play the bar, attracting a decidedly art-school crowd, and by 9:30 p.m. thunderous dance music filled what little space was filled between their bodies. Amber Spurlock, a 27-year-old nursing student, heard about the Vollrath from friends; she’s been to several shows. “It feels like one of those speakeasies, like you’re ducking down through this hidden neighborhood into the place,” she says. “It’s a completely random group of people, but it all works really nice together. It’s an amazing crowd.”


The Vollrath, reportedly a former speakeasy, brothel and biker bar, has a sordid past, albeit one that was largely forgotten by everyone outside of the Sacred Heart neighbor− hood near Fountain Square. Isolated by the construction of I-70 and I-65 during the 1960s and ’70s and bled dry by “white flight,” the neighborhood and bar withered. Traffic streaks by on Meridian Street to the east and Madison Avenue to the west, but unless you live or go to church in the bleak, working-poor neighborhood, you’d never know the bar existed.

Louis Vollrath, a businessman in the large, influential German-American community, built his café, barbershop, and beauty parlor on Palmer Avenue in 1926 at the height of Prohibition. It is rumored that Vollrath operated a speakeasy and brothel in the basement, which is still a maze of numbered rooms. There’s even a se− cret passageway leading up to a door that was once labeled “Janitor’s Closet,” which opens to a hallway in the apartment building behind the bar.

“There are so many ways in and out of this place,” Alvey said as we descended a dark stairwell, wound through the basement, went up a different flight of stairs and materialized in a different area of the bar. Legend has it that John Dillinger narrowly escaped capture using these passageways, and that crime boss Al Capone met with Indianapolis associates here.

At some point, Vollrath sold the place, and in the 1970s, the bar’s name was changed to Ballbats. It became the de facto clubhouse for the Cossacks motorcycle club. But on June 1, 1982, the Marion County Sheriff’s Department and the Indi− ana State Police executed warrants for the alleged possession and sale of marijuana and sale of stolen merchandise on 40 people, in connection with a sting operation run out of the bar. A supplier of electronic poker machines was also arrested during the sting when he showed police officers, posing as bar employees, how to use the machines for illegal gambling.

The bar cycled through a few more owners, and continued serving cold cans to those within walking distance. It would be another 25 years before anyone outside of the neighborhood would pay the Vollrath any mind.


Then, in November 2007, Alvey stopped in the Vollrath, ordered a Coke and “I fell in love with the place.” A lifelong soldier, he ran a mechanical contracting business between stints of active duty and security contracts with Black Water and Armor Group. He was consulting on a sheriff’s sale for homes in the area for a real estate developer when he noticed the squat brick building.

Alvey likens the Vollrath to neighborhood pubs in Chicago and Brooklyn. “It’s just different from what people here are used to today in the fact that it’s in the back of a neighborhood. People are used to strip center bars or you go to Broad Ripple where there’s bar after bar after bar,” he said. The comparison works because Vollrath shares the architecture, masonry, and decorative flourishes like leaded glass windows with early-20th century watering holes in larger cities.

The father of three never dreamed of owning a bar, but he had a vision for the Vollrath. He began frequenting the place and talking with the regulars, and asked the elderly woman who ran the bar since the late 1990s if she’d be interested in selling. On Dec. 1, 2007, Alvey purchased the bar and breathed life into the building.

“The walls were pink, the ceiling was peach,” he said. The white trim was dingy with cigarette smoke and the previous owner still had “a Pacers poster from when Steve Stepanovich was on the team,” Alvey said. He cleaned, painted the walls wine red with chocolate brown trim, and restored the hardwood floor.

Alvey jokes that the ornate wooden bar and bartender Debbie Rackemenn are the only things he kept. Afternoon regulars still belly up to the bar, in the same spots they al− ways have, but Alvey scoured the wood, taking off years of grime, and coppered the bar top. But more importantly, he built a stage at the far end of the room.

“No one’s gonna come here because our beer is colder than somebody else’s,” he said. Alvey believed that music was the only way he would turn this funky bar in the back of a German Catholic neighborhood into a destination. He was right.


It was slow going the first year, but then Alvey hired R.J. Wall, who had recently left a managerial job at an upscale downtown eatery, to bartend part-time. “He wasn’t with me two weeks when he got promoted to GM,” Alvey said.

Wall, who has close ties to the local music scene, began booking shows and in the last few months the bar started rattling its bones, attracting attention from live music fans and tastemakers all over the city.

“There are a lot of great bars in Indianapolis that do that, that play local music — Locals Only, Radio Radio, the Vogue, Birdy’s, Melody Inn,” said Craig “Dodge” Lile, while waiting for the Woodhands to go on stage. “But there’s just something go− ing on down here that feels sorta grassroots, that feels like a cool local resurgence. And we just want to be a part of that.”

Lile, an influential local music blogger, was hosting the first show of his My Old Kentucky Blog summer concert series. Clusters of barely legal youngsters tanked up at the bar and milled about while concert promoters Annie and Andy Skinner keep the air buzzing with a casual DJ set.

It’s an unlikely scene for this rough ‘hood, but that just adds to the appeal. Wall believes that the proximity to downtown and Fountain Square, the charm of the historic building, rumors of dirty deeds done by patrons past, and the bar’s commitment to original live music all contributed to its rapid rise.

“I had no clue it was going to end up being like this but it’s been so much fun,” Wall said.