Joe's Tavern: the west side's 120-year room

1905 — closed 2018 — reopened October 2025

A grocery and a bar: The brick building at 1201 Dunham Street, at Arnold Street in the old Polish west side, carries its construction date in its cornice: 1905. It began, in the South Bend Tribune's 2026 history of the house, as a grocery store and bar run by John Korpal. Through Prohibition the bar was raided repeatedly — the headlines survive because the present owners framed them in the back room as a "Prohibition lounge": "Roberts Crawls on Knees; Finds Liquor; Nabs One"; "Three Arrested on Rum Counts: Establishment is Raided Again by Police"; "Five Held on Liquor Charges After Jeremiah Moore Sr. 'Gets Busy.'" The raids are the bar's own preserved press, and they make Joe's the one South Bend drinking place whose dry-years record hangs framed on its own wall.

Joe Cook: From World War II the building passed through several owners, Bill Tafelski among them, before Joe and Gene Kucharski; the bar takes its name from Joseph "Joe Cook" Kucharski, who held it from the early 1960s to 1988. The plaque the new owners left scratched and intact at the end of the bar reads "Joseph 'Joe Cook' Kucharski. ONE MORE . . . THAT'S IT!" — the house's slogan, from the Friday ritual the new owners recount: factory workers came in to cash their paychecks, Joe deducted the previous week's tab, handed over the cash, and the restarted tabs began with the cry the plaque preserves. In 1992 the Rudy production, filming Pete's funeral at St. Casimir parish nearby, found the bar down the street and shot the brothers' bar-fight scene in it — Joe's plays a Joliet, Illinois bar in the film, and calls itself, in its co-owner's words, "the other Rudy bar," the famous one being Corby's on LaSalle Avenue, whose own entry follows below.

The Glecklers, the closing, and the return: Ed and Carol Gleckler bought the bar in 1988 — the year, the new owners note, when every opponent's pennant above the bar ended the season turned upside down, Notre Dame's last national-championship year — and ran it for three decades; the Glecklers were married inside the bar one football game-day morning, the ceremony officiated by Mayor Joe Kernan. The tavern's last pre-closing season was 2018, its pennants still hung for that year's opponents when Mike Schmuhl and Ed Jordanich bought the building from the Glecklers in the summer of 2020. Their restoration took five years — new systems under the old woodwork, the apartment above rebuilt, a walk-in cooler dug in (the digging turned up a thick glass beer bottle from the 1880s, before the building itself) — and Joe's reopened in October 2025, with a formal blessing on 19 March 2026, the Feast of Saint Joseph, attended by Mayor James Mueller. Its bar manager is Tony Simeri, brought out of retirement from Simeri's Old Town Tap, whose own entry follows. One boundary of the Joe's story belongs to the Private Clubs section: across Dunham Street at 1202 stood the Breezers Club, founded 1926 by automobile-minded gents, members-only on Sundays — the day Joe's was closed — for decades; it is pointed to here and told there.

Sources:

1. South Bend Tribune, "The revitalization of Joe's Tavern brings back a neighborhood bar," 20 March 2026 — 1201 Dunham Street; John Korpal's grocery store and bar of 1905; Bill Tafelski; Joe and Gene Kucharski; the namesake's tenure from the early 1960s to 1988; the Glecklers 1988–2020; the 2018 closing; the October 2025 reopening; Tony Simeri as bar manager.
2. Mike Schmuhl, "Another Round at Joe's," Notre Dame Magazine (2026) — the co-owner's first-hand account: the 1905 cornice date; the Prohibition raid headlines preserved in the back room; the Glecklers' 1988 purchase, game-day wedding officiated by Mayor Joe Kernan, and Carol Gleckler's death in 2021; the paycheck-and-tab ritual behind "One More . . . That's It!"; the 1992 Rudy bar-fight filming; the five-year restoration and the 1880s bottle; the Breezers Club at 1202 Dunham, founded 1926; the reopening of October 2025 and the blessing of 19 March 2026 with Mayor James Mueller.