Midway Tavern & Dancehall: The blues have a steady beat

Midway Tavern & Dancehall: The blues have a steady beat
April 18, 2011
Dave Hoekstra
Lake Michigan Shore

Opened in 1924, the Midway Tavern & Dancehall has one of the oldest liquor licenses in the state of Indiana. It was licensed in 1933 after Prohibition was repealed. The 175-seat roadhouse is wedged like a guitar pick into a working class neighborhood on the west side of Mishawaka.

The tavern was an American dream of Belgian immigrant Cyriel Antheunis and Dutch immigrant Martha Van Holsbeke. They purchased the Hoosier roadhouse in 1924 for $8,000. After Prohibition, Van Holsbeke began booking live jump, swing and country-western in the dance hall that resembles a European beer hall. She tended bar at the Midway for 66 years until her death in 1990 at age 92.

Her daughter Albertina Wassenhove now runs the historic bar. She began booking blues at the Midway in 1989. The Midwayâ€”which is named for its halfway point between Chicago and Detroitâ€”has garnered a regional reputation for presenting blues legends like Howlin' Wolf drummer Sam Lay, Barrelhouse Chuck, the late local pianist Pinetop Perkins and others in an intimate setting.

Wassenhove is queen of the blues in "The Princess City," as Mishawaka is named after a Native American princess. She is 83 years old.

Her husband Gustave died in 1996. They were married 46 years. He worked the assembly line at the Studebaker factory in South Bend and later opened a tool and die school in Toledo, Ohio. Wassenhove has a daughter and two sons between the ages of 44 and 52, but they are settled in their own lives.

Wassenhove is unsure about the future of the Midway. "I support this with my own money," she says during a Friday night conversation in the dance hall. "You can only use your savings for so long. It should be self sustaining, but it isn't."

Wassenhove has worked for the city treasurer's office in Mishawaka. She still works part time as an administrative assistant at the University of Notre Dame, as she has for 27 years. "I don't get many people from Notre Dame and I don't know how to overcome that," she says. "People just stay there. We're only fifteen, twenty minutes away from campus, depending how heavy your foot is."

Chicago blues pianist Barrelhouse Chuck [Goering] looks forward to playing the upright 1904 acoustic grand piano at the Midway. "One out of every one hundred clubs I play have a real piano like the Midway," he says from the road during a tour with the Kim Wilson Blues Revue. "You walk in and feel the music and passion of people that have been there. [Wassenhove] is a keeper of the memory of her mother and the place."

Wassenhove has only visited two other blues bars in her life. Two years ago customers took her to Buddy Guy's Legends in Chicago on her 81st birthday to see her friends Rod and Honey Piazza perform. (The California-based blues act also plays the Midway.) "I'm here all the time," she says. "Not too long ago I went to the Livery in Benton Harbor for the first time. My granddaughter plays the piano and I wanted to take her."

The Midway is pretty much the same as it was in 1924. The dirt floor has been replaced and there's no longer a potbellied stove. The dance hall light fixtures with little men hoisting beers are original. "Before Prohibition they had Belgian archery [with feathered arrows], Belgian bowling and homing pigeons in the back [dance hall]." Not all at the same time, of course.

Al Capone had his way with the Midway during Prohibition. "He'd bring my dad hooch," she says, while sitting at a table that has been in the dance hall since 1933. "Later on I thought maybe he was trying to sell bootleg hooch, but he never pushed that, because my mom made her own in the back, in the bathtub in the bathroom.

"One time she didn't recognize a person and we were closed for nine months. They padlocked the place. That was in 1930, '32, just before Prohibition ended." This is living history. It would be a shame if the beat does not go on.