Hard as it may be to believe, Palomino, 2491 S. Superior St. in the heart of old Bay View, is galloping toward its 25th anniversary.

Because Palomino – which owner Val Lucks calls 50/50 restaurant and bar – was one of the early signs of the Bay View boom when it opened and was immediately successful in 2002, now seemed like a good time to reflect on the history of Palomino and on its tavern building, which itself is edging toward 150 years old.

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“It's such an interesting corner – Garibaldi has been around forever, Cactus Club, this building,” Lucks muses. “I wish the walls could talk, they’d have fascinating stories.”

Lucks says she believes the corner tap dates to 1887 and that more or less jibes with the information I’ve found, even without having located a solid original construction date.

In fact, the earliest reference I found was in the 1885 Milwaukee city directory, which noted that the address was home to Anton and Annie Salbor and Peter Huber, none of whom appears to be working on-site, so it’s unclear exactly what the use of the first floor was at that time (or if perhaps there was an earlier building on the site that was only a residence).

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That block of Superior Street, however, just north of Russell Avenue, had at least three other saloons in operation that year (1885) – with more on Russell and other neighboring streets – surely heavily patronized by workers in the steel mill just beyond. Bay View was a different, much more industrial place, at that time.

Interestingly, the Milwaukee County Register of Deeds office tells me that the property was owned by from Jacob and Sarah Yates, who sold it to Frederick Miller (as in the brewing company) on Nov, 2, 1887.

That same year we find the Yates family living and operating a grocery store at the adjacent building that now houses the Cactus Club (you can read more about the immigrant Yates family here).

It seems likely they owned the land under both buildings and that either they built the tavern – city directories show the Yates family living one house to north of the Superior Street bar before 1887 – and sold it to Miller, or the brewery bought the land, razed an earlier structure and built the saloon in 1887.

Either would fit the timeline because by 1888, Samuel and Agnes Asch had moved their saloon into the building which at that point would've been a Miller Brewing Co. tied house.

Mrs. Asch was born Agnes O’Rourke in Cheltenham, England around 1841 and her husband, born in 1835, appears to have been a German immigrant to the U.K. when they married and settled in Bristol.

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In May 1884, the Aschs arrived in New York City having sailed from Swansea on the ship Cornwall with their children, including at least one of Agnes’ children from a previous marriage.

They headed for Milwaukee, where Samuel opened a wine and liquor business – it’s unclear if it was a shop or a saloon – on what is now 5th Street in Walker’s Point. By 1885, Agnes was operating a boarding house on the northwest corner of Broadway and Erie Street in the Third Ward.

The next year, Agnes also had a saloon on South Water Street and in 1887 her boarding house had moved to 3rd Street in Walker’s Point.

On Superior Street there seems to be no doubt about the nature of Samuel’s business, which was described as a saloon from here on out ... and they stayed a while.

Samuel – whose surname clearly sounds more German than English, but whose naturalization papers claim he was born in the U.K., despite those British census records that say he was a German immigrant – was something of a joiner.

In 1893, he was among the founders of the Seventeenth Ward Saloon Keepers Association, the intent of which was, “to promote harmony and good feeling among its members, to aid in strictly enforcing all laws regulating the sale of intoxicating liquors or drinks, to discontinue drunkenness or the sale of intoxicating liquors to minors or to persons approaching intoxication, and to protect each other from loss in business.”

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Two years later, he helped found the Wisconsin Saloon Keepers Benevolent Association. The year after that – 1896 – he was a co-founder of the Wisconsin Retail Liquor Dealers’ Association of Milwaukee.

In 1897, he was appointed to a committee to help organize similar organizations in Racine and Kenosha.

By 1899, however, Samuel had died, and Agnes had moved on, leaving James O’Rourke – likely a relative – to run the saloon.

After O’Rourke came Joseph Wismeth, who operated the place until around 1917, including for a couple years circa 1907-8 in partnership with Harry Nelson. During this time Wismeth also seemed to have a tavern around the corner on Wentworth, too.

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Born in Sheboygan, Wismeth ran a tavern up there before moving to Milwaukee around 1902. When Wismeth died in February 1919 a newspaper obituary noted that he had retired from the Bay View saloon about a year previous.

As was common for the realty-savvy Miller Brewing, it sold the building to Oriental Investment Company (a real estate arm of the brewery) in June 1917, perhaps because Miller could tell that Prohibition was on its way.

By that year, Henry F. Weise had followed as saloonkeeper and he paid $392.22 – 10 percent of the saloon's "book value" – in rent to Miller, which included the tied house on its spreadsheet despite it being "owned" by Oriental (wink wink nudge nudge) for half the year. 

Weise's beer sales that year were $606, all of it from the tap and at least some of it likely in buckets called "growlers" that kids would carry home or to their dads at work.

Weise remained until the earliest days of Prohibition, which kicked in on Jan. 17, 1920.

Not long after, the new Italian face of Bay View showed itself at the Superior Street business, by now ostensibly a soft drinks parlor.

Around the dawn of the 20th century, Bay View’s rolling mill began to attract Italians from the Le Marche, Piedmont, Tuscany and other regions seeking employment.

Some Italian immigrants came down from mines in the Upper Peninsula and from quarries in Red Granite and Belgium, while others came up from Chicago or arrived directly at the doorstep of St. Clair Street boarding house and saloon owner Joe Gardetto, who helped them find work, file naturalization papers and generally get settled.

Over time, most of the shops and taverns in the area were run by Italians.

The first to step behind the pine at what is now Palomino appears to be Marchegiani immigrants Adelo Santi and his wife Filomena (née Fabbri). Although the couple wouldn’t run the place all that long, and they’d have their run-ins with Prohibition – as did many in their position – their influence would endure for decades.

In 1921 – with musicians Carmelo Cicini and John Bartolaro living there – Santi’s effort to get his license renewed in April was denied as Milwaukee Police said he was “not a proper person to have a license.” 

That July, his wife was denied a dance hall license, because she was, police said, “unfit to manage” the place and her husband was convicted of violating the Mulberger Law, which allowed only beer with 2.5 percent or less alcohol to be sold.

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It’s likely for this reason that 46-year-old Joseph Succa (perhaps Zucca) was running the place later that year and Stephen Torok was doing so in 1922.

Still, the Santis were ever-present as Miller's Oriental Investments Co. sold the place to Filomena Santi on Dec. 13, 1922.

By 1926, Italian-born John Ermi – who earned nicknames like “the mustachio raiser de luxe” and “mustachioed knight” – operated the business and also was active in area sports, including baseball and bowling. Later, in fact, Ermi would work at Hank Marino (no relation) Recreation, a popular bowling spot Downtown on 5th and Wisconsin.

One of his teammates was the equally sports-entusiastic Pete Marino. When Ermi, pretty much inevitably, ran afoul of federal dry laws – his was one of five saloons raided on night in April 1927 – leading to his arrest and sentencing to four months in the house of correction, Marino appears to have stepped in to run the bar that was still owned by the Santis.

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Amazingly, he wouldn’t leave for more than a half a century.

Peter Antonio Marino was born on Buffum Street at 5:30 a.m., on Thursday, June 29, 1905, to laborer Joseph Marino and his wife Aurora Ronzella/Eleonora Fonseca.

The elder Marino – whose name in Italy was Demarinis (likely a remnant of church record keeping which had been in Latin until the arrival of Napoleon in the early 19th century) – was born in 1864, as was his wife, whose name on Pete’s birth certificate was Aurora Ronzella, though it seems her name was really Eleonora Fonseca.

They were from Lucito, in the southern Italian province of Molise, where they had a son Sam (aka Emanuele) in 1889.

Joe came to Milwaukee in 1896 or ‘97 (depending on which source you believe), with Eleonora and Sam following in 1902 or '03 (again, sources vary), and the family moved to Bay View not long after Pete’s birth.

In 1905, Joseph filed naturalization papers and his witnesses were Vincenzo Barbieri and Leonardo Loffredo, who for a time ran what is now the Cactus Club.

By 1910, while Joe was working at a florist, Sam had also become a citizen.

Young Pete would attend Dover Street School in the neighborhood, where he’d hang out so much at the Groppi family’s grocery story that they’d started to call him “Gropp,” according to Tommy Groppi.

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Later in life, Pete would say he was at the bar beginning in 1925, and perhaps he worked for Ermi or maybe even was his partner in those days, though printed references to him in relation to the saloon don’t begin to appear until 1932, when another raid found whiskey, wine and beer on the premises and he was arrested.

But it would seem almost obligatory that Marino would end up behind the bar at the Santis' place, after all he’d married Filomena’s daughter, Elizabeth Zanchetti – who everyone called Hazel – from her first marriage, in 1928.

City documents show that Filomena sold the bar to her daughter and son-in-law in September 1933 for $100.

Pete and Hazel Marino would be the faces of the bar until their deaths in 1981 and 1984, and everyone who lived in Bay View during that long stretch of time likely knew one or both of them and likely either had a beer at their bar or a plate of spaghetti, either inside the place or carried out and enjoyed at home.

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And everyone, it seems, remembers the meatballs.

Though the Marinos were from Molise, their granddaughter Dani Marino Graf said, “Filomena Fabbri and both of her husbands (Zanchetti and Santi) were from Fossombrone in LeMarche and the recipes were from there, exactly reproduced.”

Those recipes, Pete would tell reporters, were four generations old.

“(We) used to bring a big kettle and have them fill it with spaghetti on Saturdays to take home,” Gail Germanson recalled in a social media post, and Paula Marsh added, “My parents would get Hazel’s spaghetti and meatballs for take out.

“You brought in your own bowl for her to fill. Ours was the large Tupperware Mix and Fix bowl in mint green. I still crave that spaghetti. My grandma and grandpa played in a cribbage league when it was Marino’s. They lived two doors to the north.”

Graf told a reporter, "Sometimes they would feed as many as 200 workers at lunch. They would serve themselves and pay later.”

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In the 1930s, Pete recalled later, “we used to have fish fries every Friday for 10 cents a plate.”

Marino’s was also known to be a reflection of Pete’s passion for three sports – which remain to this day celebrated in the mirrors on the back bar – golf, baseball and bowling. Marino’s would sponsor teams in all three sports for years.

“We used to keep fishing poles outside for the customers,” Pete remembered decades later. “You had to do a lot of those kind of tricks to make a buck during the Depression.’

In addition to being a watering hole and source of delicious food for the neighborhood, Marino’s was also popular with longshoremen from the nearby port and for workers from the steel mill. When the Kaszubes were forced off Jones Island in the 1920s and ‘30s, they became customers, too.

In the 1950s, Hazel’s mom and her husband Adelo Santi lived upstairs. For a time in the late 1940s, Hazel’s dad, Filomena’s ex-husband, also lived up there, which must have made for interesting dinner table conversation.

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But it was a different time and people looked out for each other, even if it might be uncomfortable, and Gustave Zanchetti was ill and had nowhere else to live. So, of course, the Santis would take him in.

In fact, Mindy Ceretto Rupp – another lifelong Bay Viewer from a multi-generational neighborhood Italian family – recalls that her grandparents took Pete in for a time, too, after his father passed in 1923.

By the time the Milwaukee Journal profiled 72-year-old Pete as “the oldest tavernkeeper in Bay View,” his son Dick – who grew up in the tavern – was running most of the business, though the elder Marino could still be found behind the bar, cigar in hand. He and Hazel still lived upstairs in the apartment they remodeled in 1954.

“‘I’m from the old school,” Pete told a reporter. “‘I won’t tend bar with these hooligans at night.’ The younger generation is taking over. They keep the jukebox going 90 miles an hour.

“‘Sometimes there are 50 people at the bar and I don’t recognize any of them. The old people don’t go out much anymore. They don’t go out or they’re all dead’.”

That same year, Pete was inducted into the Milwaukee Bowling Association Hall of Fame.

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But the transition on Russell and Superior was by now in full swing.

Though Dick excelled at sports at Bay View High and played baseball at Michigan State and later WIsconsin, Pete, Graf recalled, wasn’t impressed, which seems odd given his own passion for sports.

“He told (Dick), ‘Get a real job’,” she told the Journal Sentinel, so her father came back to Milwaukee and began working at the bar. In 1976, she said, he took over.

In 1979, one advertisement called the place Dick & Pete Marino’s Tavern but that October, Pete and Hazel sold the bar to Dick and his wife Marion.

And then in late June 1981, Pete suffered a heart attack and died at home, above the place where he’d spent the majority of his 76 years.

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Three years later, Hazel passed away.

In 1986, Dick renamed the place Marino’s Sportsman’s Tap.

In 2000, Dick sold the bar and it operated briefly as Nellie’s, before local restaurateurs Scott Johnson and Leslie Montemurro bought it and transformed it into Palomino.

“It was a cop/firefighter bar,” Johnson recalls of Nellie’s. “He wouldn’t serve you unless he knew you. Lots of stories back in the day of folks going in there and sitting down at an empty bar and him not even looking up from his paper. So then they would just leave.”

Nellie’s was opened by Steve Nelson – presumably no relation to Harry Nelson, who ran the bar with Joseph Wismeth in 1907-8, but stranger things have happened – a Bay View High graduate who, after serving in the Army, was a truck driver, among other things, before going into the tavern business.

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Nellie’s had a couple pop culture connections, too. The bar appeared in the film “Milwaukee, Minnesota” – starring Bruce Dern and Randy Quaid – and Nelson later wrote a historical novel about the Civil War, called “Civil Bloods.”

“Yeah that’s who we bought it from,” Johnson remembers. “Decent guy, just an old school tough guy. That was typical of Bay View back in the day. Even Cactus, before Eric (Uecke) bought it, was a dock workers bar. Very working class.”

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Johnson says that there was not really any rhyme or reason for selecting the name Palomino, beyond how it sounded and the fact that it would “look good on T-shirts and stickers.”

“We called it Palomino because we liked the name,” he says. “No other reason really. It was a different era. Everything was creative and novel. And we wanted to serve a version of southern food. Chicken fried steak and a meat and two sides kind of thing. It worked for a while!”

As for changes, while a 2002 OnMilwaukee article noted that Johnson and Montemurro didn’t alter a ton – a fact he reiterates now – I clearly remember the place having not just a different vibe, but a different look, in part because Marino’s seemed so dark and closed off to the outside for so long.

Palomino got a good scrub down and was tacked up with a fake fireplace, new lighting, booths and some other changes.

“I remember that it had green astroturf glued to the terrazzo floor,” Johnson says with a laugh. “It was a motherf*cker to get the adhesive off. Oddly, one night after working in there all day/night and going through gallons of stinky adhesive remover I went to Cactus or Garibaldi for a few beers.

“I got to talking to someone about why my hands were all covered in adhesive gook and they suggested liquid Tide! I went the next morning and got some and slathered it over the hard adhesive and 10 minutes later I scraped it off with a putty knife, like it was frosting!”

Fortunately, some elements remained: the pool table in the back, the classic wood paneling and the stunning Art Deco bar and back bar, which remain today, along with the mirrors adorned with the golfer, bowler and baseball player.

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Johnson also explains how Palomino got its signature shot...

“There was also a tin of leftover stock-Grape Pucker and Smirnoff Ice and cases and cases of ginger brandy,” he says. “So we started drinking it and getting our friends to drink it too and it became the ‘house shot’.”

When I visit recently, Val Lucks says that folks believe the place is haunted, adding that she – like I – are skeptical of these kinds of stories, but her bar manager quickly chimes in that there is a ghost.

Johnson, unprompted, tells me, “There was also a mischievous ghost that used to constantly knock glasses onto the floor or slam doors when the place was empty. There was a legend about one of the Marino grandfathers who died upstairs and he was supposed to have been quite the rascal.

“He was always scaring us but never anything spooky, just acting like someone was there when the closers knew the bar was empty! As time went on the incidents got fewer and fewer, but in the early days it was hard to get used to.”

If you’re a believer, you might think this is Pete, which is what his granddaughter believes.

"In the early 2000’s all the bartenders would tell us it was him," Graf says.

"Someone gave us a photo of him to put up in the back bar, and things kind of calmed down after that," Johnson adds.

Lucks, who is from Chicago, came to Milwaukee with her brother Adam to partner with Johnson and Montemurro on adding food to Comet Cafe.

“(Adam) and I wanted to open a restaurant and we were trying to do it in Chicago for a long time,” she says. “And Scott is an old friend of mine, a good friend, and we used to come and hang out in Milwaukee all the time. They were just like, ‘you should do this in Milwaukee. It's a great city. It's easier.’ And so we came up and partnered with Comet in 2005.  

“We opened Honey Pie (on Kinnickinnic Avenue) in 2009, and then in 2013, Adam and I partnered on Palomino with Scott and Leslie. Neighborhoods change, concepts need to change and Palomino was due for a change. If a restaurant doesn't shift, sales start to decline and it's time to shift to what people want.”

So, the Lucks made some alterations of their own, though, again, in a gradual, thoughtful way.

“We closed it down for a little bit and built out the bar a little bit more, made some updates to the space and shifted the menu at that point away from the frozen bagged food stuff to scratch-made comfort food,” she says.

“It had a little bit of a Southern bent, but not so deeply Southern, but kind of a little bit of a Southern twang. So that went on for a few years. And we also at that time really shifted into it being a bourbon bar. We leaned in heavily to our love of bourbon.”

They also built a Honeypie bake shop kitchen in part of what was the pool table area in 2016. A cooler nearby has a selection of pies.

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Things went well until the pandemic, when Palomino closed its dining room and bar and shifted to selling food to-go and continued to use the Marinos’ old apartment upstairs as its office and to bake pies in the kitchen.

“We went back and forth through a lot of versions (during Covid),” Lucks says. “We were utilizing the building the whole time. But we went through a period where we were only selling food out the side windows so people could walk up and order and they'd go sit on the patio. Then we went through a version where it was order-only at the bar.

“Then right after the pandemic when hiring was so tough, we actually closed for about six months. It might've been almost a year where we weren't doing any service at all.”

Other than the kitchen and office, which remained active, the place was only used for some special events during that time.

Once they got Honey Pie and Comet back up to speed – in some cases using staff from Palomino – they could again focus on Palomino.

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“Honey Pie and Comet are just really big behemoths of restaurants,” Lucks explains. “They're busy all the time. They're open all the time. And so the staff staffing needed there was really high. We were like, ‘if we can get these up and running and healthy again, then everything else can be running and healthy again.’ That was our strategy and thankfully it worked.”

Then in September 2022, Palomino began bar service again with some snacks available and a food truck out on Russell Avenue and over time full bar and restaurant service came back.

We take a walk around and check out some of the gems inside, including an old hand-painted sign advertising Hazel’s spaghetti and, just outside the kitchen, the original exterior Palomino sign.

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She shows me a couple photos of Pete behind the bar (one of which I attempt to recreate with Val) and another of Dick and Marion taken at the 50th reunion of their Bay View High School graduating class.

Upstairs we check out the office, where the Marinos and so many others – saloonkeepers, mill workers, musicians – lived.

In the basement we check out the blocked-up doors that used to lead to the same tunnels that reportedly connected to Cactus Club, Garibaldi, Groppi’s, Puddlers Hall and other neighborhood businesses.

Lucks says the building’s long past makes itself known every now and then.

“We've found all kinds of just weird little things,” she says. “When we had one wall open behind the bar – we had cut a hole because we were doing some wiring for something – and I pulled out a newspaper. The headline said ‘Nixon resigns.’ It was like this perfectly folded newspaper.

“The kitchen was definitely built on or expanded at some point (likely 1940) because you can see where the foundation is in one spot and the floor kind of slopes down from there. So it has quirks like that where the floors aren't level and the plumbing's very old and if you touch one piece of it, it's like a domino effect of everything.

“It's a cool building to work in. It does have that really long history, which is neat. It has a good vibe, it has a good soul.”