The thing that caught my eye about these photos wasn’t the wreck – it looks pretty minor. It was the neighborhood in the vicinity of Broadway and Perry Ave. and how it has changed since these photos were taken in the mid-1960s. Almost everything on the south side of Broadway has been gobbled up by Southeast Hospital. Click on the photos to make them larger.
Stubb’s Beer Garden gone
The 1968 City Directory lists the following businesses in this block of Broadway
- 1700 – Lacy’s Texaco Service
- 1703 – Bill Wescoat’s Trailer Rental Service & Wescoat Motor Company
- 1704 – Cape Drive-in Cleaners
- 1720 – Stubb’s Beer Palace
- 1736 – Child’s IGA Foodliner
The city directory might list it as Stubb’s Beer Palace, but we always referred to it as the Beer Garden. It’s a parking lot now. Child’s Foodliner is occupied by an orthodontics practice.
2011 Aerial of SE Hospital -1700 Block
Here is a 2011 aerial of the area. Perry Avenue comes in the from the left. Capaha Park is at top left, and Southeast Hospital takes up most of the right side of the photo. You can go here to see aerial photos of the area in 1964.
Wreck doesn’t look serious
Looks like car vs. pole and sign. I learned a long time ago not to play crash investigator and speculate about the cause of a wreck.
I may have told this story before. I had to testify in a civil suit involving a car crash. I showed up with more prints than Arlo Guthrie in Alice’s Restaurant. I was barely old enough to have a driver’s license of my own, so one of the attorneys tried to get me to speculate about the cause of the accident and to lead me into making a statement he could pounce on. I kept saying, “The photo shows x, y and z. That’s all I can tell you.”
“You testified that the skid marks were 37 feel long. Could they have been 34 or 38 feet long and not 37 feet long? What makes you so sure they were 37 feet long.”
“I took a tape measure and measured them because I figured some lawyer would ask me that.”
“No further questions.”
Houses are all gone
It’s hard to believe that the Broadway facing Capaha Park was once filled with family homes. John Hilpert, one of my best buddies in grade school lived in an old two-story house on the other side of Louisiana Avenue.