Dorman Street Saloon

The Dorman Street Saloon has a long and fabled history in Cottage Home Neighborhood on the near eastside. Variously known as Anacker’s Tavern, the 9th Street Tavern, The Mahogany Bar (shortened to “The Hog,” a nickname still used today), May’s Lounge, and currently The Dorman Street Saloon, the bar has been a favorite watering hole on its corner at Dorman and Ninth Streets for at least 80 years.

The bar started out as a house. Joseph Rieger, a German-born railroad carpenter, applied for a building permit for this house in late 1871. In 1900 he lived in the two-story frame house with his daughter and her photographer husband.

When the house became a tavern is hard to pinpoint, but it was probably in the 1910s when the Frederick Miller Brewing Company bought the property, which by then had been expanded and converted into a grocery store. Miller Brewing Company owned many small taverns throughout the country including several in Indianapolis. This all came to a screeching halt in 1919 when Prohibition was enacted and Miller sold the building in January 1920.

The store was a grocery, restaurant, and ice cream parlor in the 1920s and ‘30s, changing management every few years until Clarence O. and Amelia Anacker took over from about 1930 until at least 1945. Persistent rumors exist that the bar was frequented by John Dillinger, who robbed the nearby Massachusetts Avenue State Bank on September 6, 1933. Some even heard that he sat in the bar/grocery while he planned the heist.

After the Anacker’s left in the mid-1940s, the bar was managed by several different people and suffered a fire in 1956.

The saloon features a Rookwood tile bar that reportedly came out of the Old Greyhound Bus Station which was formerly the Interurban Depot. The bar’s tiles were made by architectural ceramic artist Ernest A. Batchelder, an important Arts and Crafts Movement tile designer who worked in California. The earth-toned tiles feature animals and date to between 1914 (when he opened a large factory in Los Angeles) and 1932 when the factory closed due to the Depression.

For more information visit http://dormanstreet.com/bar/