Urban Spelunking is brought to you by Nicolet Law.
Washington Avenue in Cedarburg is home to not one, but two vintage Blatz Beer signs and they’re right across the street from one another.
One of the signs, for example, hangs outside Union House, a restaurant and bar at W62 N559 Washington Ave., where one local historian believes it has been glowing since the late 1930s or early 1940s.
“We’ve turned the sign into a kind of ‘open’ sign, if you will,” says Union House’s Chris Homayouni. “If it's on, we're open. If it's not, we're not.
“It illuminates so much of the sidewalk, especially at night or when it's starting to get darker out. So it really brightens up this whole side of the building.”
While the sign might suggest dive bar to some, you can’t always trust snap judgments.
“I think a lot of people kind of assume that it's a dive bar because the signs generally are on bars, not necessarily restaurants," Homayouni adds. "It kind of gives us that element of surprise. People come in and they're like, 'oh, there's actually a restaurant here. We can sit and have cool tapas and really great, award-winning cocktails’.”
Union House is a family business, with Chris and his mother CJ running the place, which was designed by Chris’ sister Madissen and built out by Chris and his dad Payman.
Both the Union House name and the family involvement recall the earliest days of the cream city brick building that the restaurant inhabits.
As you might guess from the etched stone near the top of the building’s facade, it was erected in 1883, for John C. Kuhefuss Sr. – hence the initials J.C.K. – who operated a livery service and boarding stable.
Kuhefuss was born on Feb. 11, 1828 in Stuttgart, Germany, where as a young man he worked as a farm stock buyer.
In 1850, Kuhefuss left Germany and settled in Hartford, Wisconsin, where he worked on farms for about four years before returning home. Later that same year, 1854, Kuhefuss came back to Wisconsin – this time to Schlessingerville (the name of which was changed in 1921 to Slinger), where he married Fredericka Hack, who had accompanied him on his return from Germany.
Soon, however, the couple was back in Hartford, where they bought a place and ran a saloon and a livery business, while John also served as Washington County Deputy Sheriff.
In 1872, the family sold and relocated to Third Street in Milwaukee and Kuhefuss worked manufacturing washing machines for a couple years.
In 1875, the Kuhefuss clan moved up to Cedarburg and bought the site of the current Union House from John Kluth. They opened a hotel and returned to the livery business, operating a transportation service and presumably boarding horses in the stables out back. He also sold horse-drawn buggies and sleighs.
Eight years later, obviously doing well enough, Kuhefuss built the current building, which was a hotel – called the Union House – and surely also a saloon. At the back is a small addition (now housing the kitchen) that served as a stable.
Work began around June 1, 1883, reported the Cedarburg Weekly News, which in its Aug. 29 issue offered this update:
“The new hotel built by Mr. J. C. Kuhefuss is nearly completed, the masons are plastering all the rooms and the carpenters are busy laying the floors. It makes a good appearance and will be furnished with all the latest improvements.”
The two-story Italianate structure has brick pilasters at the entrance and corners, carved keystones in the arched lintels, arched transoms above the doors, a corbelled brick cornice and it had, but no longer has, an ornamental cast iron balcony above the central entrance.
Though the balcony is gone, if you look, you can see two metal pieces jutting out from the facade where it once was connected.
The building was one of many lavish and lovely masonry structures – some of brick, some of local limestone and fieldstone – lining Cedarburg’s main drag in the 19th century. Fortunately, many of them survive.
“In the Washington Avenue Historic District, highly skilled masons constructed distinctive locally quarried limestone and fieldstone buildings dating from the 1840s to the early 20th century,” notes the Wisconsin Historical Society’s Architectural Inventory.
“The district's structures were designed in Greek Revival, Italianate, Queen Anne and vernacular architectural styles, and many were the homes and businesses of early German and Irish settlers.”
Kuhefuss died in 1906, but his family continued to own the building for another 22 years. The Kuhefuss family also occupied the Kuhefuss Home up the street – now a museum – as well as the Schroeder House, which is now an annex to the Washington House Hotel, about a block north of the Union House. (Kuhefuss’ daughter-in-law Louise Blank was a niece of Mrs. William Schroeder.)
Over the years, the upper floor has served as residential and office space and the first floor has been used as a tavern with a small retail space on the south end.
From roughly 1939 until 1949, the bar was called the Horseman's Inn and was run by Jackson-born William Hahmann, who was active in horse racing. Hahmann ran a Horseman's Inn tavern at Nash Street and Green Bay Avenue in Milwaukee before moving it up to Cedarburg.
For a time the first floor was home to Fritz’s Barber Shop and Saloon and in the early ‘80s it was Fritz’s Country Saloon.
By the early 1990s it had become RJ Thirsty’s, owned by the Rzentkowski family, which in the 2010s rented the tavern to Dan Brush for the Easy Street Pub, which closed in 2017.
Soon after, the Taraboi family bought the building and rented it to Grafton’s Ambur and Jimmy Vance, who ran JJ’s there until during the early days of the pandemic, they decided to move on.
"At the beginning of this year, we were debating whether or not to renew our lease," Ambur told the Journal Sentinel. "With corona coming in and canceling all of the festivals and stuff like that, we could no longer afford to keep it open."
In the summer of 2020, the Homayounis bought out the Vance’s lease and prepared to open Union House that October.
“I used to run festivals (in Cedarburg) and I'd gotten furloughed and I thought, ‘I'm not someone who can just sit around and wait’,” BJ Homayouni recalls. “Chris was working down in Milwaukee for a Stand Eat Drink Group and he just kind of wanted to do his own thing.”
At first they considered opening a cookie shop, but when the Union House space became available, they pivoted.
“I was just like, ‘well, what do you want to do’,” BJ says. “But then this space came open and he has all this bar experience and restaurant experience, and I just looked at him and I said, ‘is this of interest to you?’ And he said, ‘yeah’.”
“Think it was actually a 15-minute texting conversation,” Chris adds.
“We just wanted buy-in from the whole family,” BJ continues. “So my husband, my daughter, him and myself ... I asked a couple of times to make sure everyone was on board. I didn't just ask once and they all said yes every time. So it was like, ‘okay, let's do this’.”
Madissen put her design eye to work and Payman, who is an engineer, worked with Chris to bring her vision to life.
They removed an old pool table that sat in the middle of the bar space and replaced it with tables Payman made himself.
They cleaned up the barnwood and corrugated metal wainscoting that was already in place. They built a new back bar atop existing coolers, added imitation greenery and neon signs to the walls and punched an opening into the small retail space to get more room.
They also built a large patio out back, which was a wise move because, of course, when they opened in autumn of 2020, the coronavirus pandemic was still on everyone’s mind.
“We decided first we would just open the bar,” says BJ. “The kitchen was in really bad shape. They hadn't used it for a long time, so things were rusty. It was a lot to redo the kitchen and get it up and running.”
In a weird way, perhaps, Chris says that the pandemic helped Union House get on its feet, rather than hindering it.
“Everything’s already been shut down, what's the worst case that's going to happen,” he asks, rhetorically. “It's kind of one of those situations where it's just go full-force ahead. In most cases, you advertise your restaurant, you have a big grand opening and you get slammed, and then four years later you start to see that slight decline in how excited people are about it.
“I think it kind of allowed us to do it the opposite, because there was so many restrictions on covid, people still had to do social distancing, we had to keep our tables so far apart, so we only opened with five tables inside. Now we're at 30 tables.
“It allowed us to not only increase the tables, but also increase staff at over time, to increase volume and then also allow more guests in over time. So we didn't get quite hit so hard in the beginning, and it's kind of allowed us to grow with our own popularity, which is a little different.”
It also allowed time to get that kitchen work done, BJ adds.
“We could slowly introduce the food,” she says. “That gave us (time) to figure out how to do the things that we needed to do, and also to be really careful in the foods that we introduced and to even experiment with things.”
Now, Union House is celebrating its fourth anniversary and feels strong going into its fifth year.
And alongside its craft cocktails and tapas menu, it offers $1 Blatz beers during happy hour in homage to that glowing red neon outside.
“That was our opening pitch,” says Chris, noting that folks would come in for a beer and discover the food and cocktails. “Come get a Blatz for a dollar, and very quickly people took advantage of that.
“It's nostalgic. Like, ‘oh, my dad used to drink this,’ or ‘it was my first beer.’ We had one lady who said her mom used to drink it, and (recalled that) you'd go get a Blatz and a cigarette for a dollar somewhere. That's kind of where it all started. Kind of a fun thing, a nostalgic thing and people really like it.”
BJ adds, “What's nice is that now I see people come in here now for our tapas and our cocktails, but then they see that we have Blatz and they'll say, ‘hey, I want to try one. I wonder what they taste like’ or ‘I haven't had one for a long time.’ So it's kind of nice that it’s reversed a bit for us.”
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., where he lived until he was 17, Bobby received his BA-Mass Communications from UWM in 1989 and has lived in Walker's Point, Bay View, Enderis Park, South Milwaukee and on the East Side.
He has published three non-fiction books in Italy – including one about an event in Milwaukee history, which was published in the U.S. in autumn 2010. Four more books, all about Milwaukee, have been published by The History Press.
With his most recent band, The Yell Leaders, Bobby released four LPs and had a songs featured in episodes of TV's "Party of Five" and "Dawson's Creek," and films in Japan, South America and the U.S. The Yell Leaders were named the best unsigned band in their region by VH-1 as part of its Rock Across America 1998 Tour. Most recently, the band contributed tracks to a UK vinyl/CD tribute to the Redskins and collaborated on a track with Italian novelist Enrico Remmert.
He's produced three installments of the "OMCD" series of local music compilations for OnMilwaukee.com and in 2007 produced a CD of Italian music and poetry.
In 2005, he was awarded the City of Asti's (Italy) Journalism Prize for his work focusing on that area. He has also won awards from the Milwaukee Press Club.
He has be heard on 88Nine Radio Milwaukee talking about his "Urban Spelunking" series of stories, in that station's most popular podcast.
