The Midway as a music room: jump, swing, and the Home of the Blues

810 WEST FOURTH STREET · SHARED AT ANCHOR SIZE WITH THE BARS RECORD

The Midway Tavern's whole course — the house, the family, the bar — stands in the Bars & Nightclubs record of this history; what stands here is the same room read as a music institution, which for most of a century is what it also was. The Antheunes family's low frame building in the Belgian West End was, from the repeal of Prohibition in December 1933 forward, three things in one: a neighborhood tavern, a dance hall, and a music room. The trade's course was set in the repeal year, in the Bars record's words: after repeal the room booked live jump, swing and country-western music, "bringing musicians in from all over," while the Belgian decoration of Martha Antheunes's 1933 remodeling stayed on the walls. A working music room with a resident keeper — Martha's tenure behind the bar runs, in the record's two unreconciled forms, sixty-six or sixty-seven years to her death in 1990 — is an institution by any measure this section uses, and it is the only commercial music room in Mishawaka whose course the record carries unbroken across the century.

Its second life is the documented one. Martha's daughter Albertina Wassenhove has run the Midway since 1990 and books its talent herself; the booking that turned the room began, by Dave Hoekstra's account in the Chicago Sun-Times, in 1989, when Albertina put the Swingin' Crawdads on the Midway's stage — the start of the blues-booking era that made the tavern a blues room of regional standing under the billing "Home of the Blues." The room carries the era on its walls — more than five thousand signatures by Hoekstra's count — and at its bar stands Albertina's early-1900s upright piano, the one she practiced on as a girl: the blues room's owner is a musician, and the instrument of her childhood is part of the house's furniture. The professional record noticed: the Washington Blues Society's Bluesletter of January 2018 profiled her among the Blues Foundation's Keeping the Blues Alive honorees of that year, weeks after she turned ninety. In a city whose dance halls went unrecorded and whose ballroom was a school auditorium, the room that kept live music longest is a Belgian family's bar on West Fourth Street — operating in November 2026, its walls signed by two generations of the musicians it booked.

Sources:

1. The Bars & Nightclubs record of this history — the Midway whole: the repeal-era bookings of jump, swing and country-western acts, the 1989 Swingin' Crawdads booking and the blues era under Albertina Wassenhove, the "Home of the Blues" billing, the signature walls and the upright piano, the Keeping the Blues Alive profile of January 2018 (Dave Hoekstra's Sun-Times account of November 2010 as its principal source) — carried here at shared anchor size, as the entry states.