Rebuilding the Rock Cafe

This is the man who’s behind the rebuilding of the Rock Cafe in Stroud, Okla.

He is David Burke, owner of David Burke Historic Preservation, based in Perry, Okla. He’s the one who is directing the painstakingly reconstruction of the Route 66 restaurant after a devastating fire last May. And he’s reasonably certain the Rock Cafe will reopen to customers before Memorial Day.

Burke is an affable man who speaks deliberately, which matches his exacting work. On a day we toured the facility, the rock walls had been restored and the main roof was nearly complete, save for the installation of a heating-cooling unit. Burke was waiting for a delivery of lumber to complete the pent roof that juts from the restaurant’s stone walls. The work on the pent roof, he estimated, will be finished within 10 days.

Rebuilding the Rock was a bit more difficult, Burke said, because there were no blueprints from when it was built in 1939. Burke also discovered that other blueprints made during a remodeling a few years ago were inaccurate.

“Whoever drew this up,” he said, pointing to a latter-day blueprint, “didn’t even get on the roof, and was just guessing.”

He had to essentially became a detective to figure out how the Rock Cafe was built. Paint, insulation or tar lines —  Burke calls them “ghost marks” — on the “guntower” corners of the restaurant’s stone walls helped him determine the pitch of the pent roof.

Burke also relied on a lot of photos — vintage ones and even recent images taken by Rock Cafe owner Dawn Welch. The image below, taken during the 1950s, turned out to be a crucial guide for the reconstruction. Many of the old photos — and of the rebuilding — are stored on a computer for quick reference.

Burke said the large “ROCK CAFE” letters on the pent roof seen in the photo will be brought back. Also, he plans to eventually to re-create the “Rock Cafe” neon sign, above the doorway, that’s in the photo.

This former storeroom in the back of the restaurant will be converted into a kitchen, Burke said. Also, two handicapped-accessible restrooms will be built and be accessible from both the dining room and the outdoor patio. The storeroom/future kitchen has heat and air-conditioning, and serves as a workshop area for the entire reconstruction project. The big Coca-Cola sign, incidentally, was a gift from Burke to Welch and her family.

The main dining room will have knotty pine and cedar and 10-foot ceilings, Burke said. The counter and stools won’t be brought back. However, Welch told me that jettisoning them and moving the kitchen to the storeroom will increase the Rock Cafe’s serving capacity from 25 customers to about 75.

Burke said the most difficult part was reconstructing portions of the stone walls that had collapsed after the fire. It wasn’t the actual wall-rebuilding that proved vexing, he said, but finding the right color of stone to match the original.

Welch wants to have the Rock Cafe open again by May 20, the anniversary of the fire. Burke said he’s optimistic he can make that possible.

“I think we’re way ahead of schedule,” he said. “We jumped in and got a lot of things accomplished early. It set us up so we could take the time and do a lot of things properly. We’re setting about well as we could expect.”

As I left Stroud on Route 66, I saw Burke’s shipment of lumber for the pent roof arrive on a flatbed trailer.