Venice Cafe in Benton Park is a St. Louis landmark
Ask anyone in town about Venice Cafe and chances are their eyes get really wide. Or, if they’ve known this Benton Park bar a long time, they may smile a warm but faintly sympathetic smile. It’s like you’ve mentioned an old, mutual friend who, like Peter Pan on a tremendous quantity of ’shrooms, has never grown up. On the other hand, any attempt to describe the place to a newcomer tends to fail dismally. But, on the off-chance that you’ve never been, we’re going to try.
It’s a wonder, at this point, that there’s any room to sit down, or even get inside Venice Cafe. Owner Jeff Lockheed has been decorating this space ever since he bought the Pestalozzi Street property as his residence in 1978. He and his friend, artist Paul Cuba (who died in 2002) opened Venice Cafe in 1988. “We didn’t know what we were doing,” Lockheed said. That clearly isn’t true. With an art degree and a resume as colorful as the walls and floors around him (he was both a teacher and a flight attendant for a time), he has – bit by tiny bit – created an institution. He credits his parents for his wacko, kaleidoscopic eclecticism: “They were very straight and I didn’t express myself much at home. So when I left, I took off,” Lockheed explained.
He admits he doesn’t stick to the rules. Yes, you can make a boat into a patio bar. Yes, you can suspend a pair of plastic legs from a ceiling. You can mosaic a wall with kitschy ashtrays or even trim it with “a thousand” cigarette (or doobie) lighters. Somewhere in here there’s a costume-wearing tortoise called Big Tiny. Somewhere there’s a Doric column topped with bunnies, a few Virgin Marys and (if I’m not mistaken) a palm-sized Maria von Trapp. Cow skulls and bird skulls are recurring themes, and so are tailors’ dummies, each stuck with a pirate’s chestworth of buttons and gems. “I’m an alley shopper,” Lockheed said. “I add stuff all the time, often in such small ways people don’t even know they’re not seeing it.”
Naturally, this slightly renegade party atmosphere has attracted a diverse crowd over the years. But the mood is a little more demure now than it has been in the past. “We’ve had our share of drunken idiots,” Lockheed said. “We were always this weird place in the city that people needed to check out.” For the first eight years, he had to employ a guard. Contributing in large part to Lockheed’s “private Idaho” are the open mic nights and the live hipster rock. The bar is, and always has been, cash only.
It’s important to note that much of the real art here – in particular, the human forms carved from limestone and other materials – is Lockheed’s own work. It’s hard at times not to feel like it’s a bit of a shame this more serious beauty is lost in the shuffle. But if we remember the essential, symbiotic relationships between play and creativity, and creativity and joy, we begin to understand that a trip to Venice Cafe is much more than a wacky night out on the town. It is – more importantly – a peep inside an artist’s mind, and a glimpse of its potential.
1903 Pestalozzi St., St. Louis, 314.772.5594, thevenicecafe.com
