A local developer with experience in reviving old buildings has purchased the former County Line Barbecue site, also known for years as the Oklahoma Prohibition-era Kentucky Club, in Oklahoma City.
The site sits just off the Interstate 44 alignment of Route 66 from the 1950s to the 1980s. It also is a short distance from the Kelley Avenue alignment that carried Route 66 from the 1920s to the 1950s.
The County Line Barbecue once was a popular spot to dine for Route 66 travelers who were visiting the nearby National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum.
Steve Lackmeyer of The Oklahoman newspaper had the story of owner Chip Fudge and architect Brian Fitzsimons seeking to bring the restaurant back to its Kentucky Club roots:
Workers are scraping off multiple layers of paint from the knotty pine panels that line the stable-style booths.
“For the last 50 years it’s been scabbed on to and added on to,” Fudge said. “That always creates a challenge. We have to go back and do all new electric, all new HVAC. We’re taking the paint off the booths to where they will look like they did when they were built in the 1930s.”
The south half of the building that boasts a hillside view of downtown and the state Capitol is being redesigned to host more patrons with changes to include a doubling of the bar area.
The article contains a lot of information about Kentucky Club owner Tony Marneres, a Greek immigrant, who arrived in the OKC area in the mid-1930s and opened the club a few years later. The place, which was outside city limits at the time, was known for illicit gambling and bootlegging (Oklahoma voters ended the state’s prohibition on alcohol in 1958).
Marneres sold the property in the early 1980s shortly after attaining U.S. citizenship.
More about The Kentucky Club can be found in this video below:
The County Line Barbecue closed in 2010. An Italian eatery opened there a couple of years later, but it closed, as well.
(Excerpted image from Google Street View in 2011 of the County Line Barbecue in Oklahoma City)