An article in a Saturday feature edition of The State Journal-Register, which was published in April of 1978 has been dug up from the archives. The feature is all on Southtown, which may have been a bit different 37 years ago. Businesses mentioned in the article include The Cracked Crock Tavern, Spoon River, Black Thumb, The King Harvest Food Co-op, The Southtown TV, Southtown Motors, Coast To Coast, and Southtown Lounge. Here’s a quote from the article:

A tall, red-haired man wearing a bowler derby and wide suspenders over his collarless shirt, wags a finger at his companions. “That’s what I said,” the man repeats. “The neighborhood sure has gone to hell. Nothing left around here but hippies and hobos. I remember when this was a family neighborhood, respectable you know, working class people who kept decent hours and knew the value of a hard-earned buck.”

The article talks a lot about the history of Southtown prior to 1978, such as an ice cream shop called The Sugar Bowl existing at some point, and The Southtown Grill was located next to that. Other older businesses (existing as early as the Prohibition days included The Rialto Tavern, The Air-Dome, The Empress Movie House (admission for movies was twenty cents), Zupancic’s, A pool hall, The Southtown Theater, Jim McManus Saloon, Herman Oger’s Shoe Shop, Fassero Brothers Butcher Shop, Art Lehne’s Bakery, The Southtown Barber Shop, Sanger Dairy, Jefferson Bank (which was around until 1927), Kerst Hardware, and more. You can check out other pages from the article below (click on the images to zoom in), or check out our historic Southtown album on flickr for these pages as well as many more old photos of our neighborhood.

To top all of that all off, here is a photo of Kevin slam dancing inside of Black Sheep at some point during our early years.