IRON HORSE
IRON HORSE
“I rode motorcycles from the time i was 15, worked as a messenger in DC for several years and always had a soft spot for classic bikes. Curt Large and I rolled with that theme at Iron Horse and Billy Colbert laid down the design tracks.”
Once we landed on classic motorcycles as the theme and Iron Horse for a name I got to work tracking down some bikes. I found a beautiful 1966 Triumph and a similar vintage Norton, but both were expensive at +- $8,000. So we needed to go budget on the rest. That’s when we decided to have the upstairs be British bikes with a refined wood paneled look, and the downstairs be an homage to the Japanese bikes of the 60’s that took America by storm. A gold glittered Honda 360 twin was the anchor with two 1966cc Honda commuter bikes that had announced the arrival of Japanese bikes in the USA 50 years before we found them. We hung these machines on an I-beam overhead and they watched over our faithful crowd for years.
Artist and good friend Billy Colbert went to work bringing his brand of cultural cacophony to the table. In one moment of brilliance, he took some of our classic motorcycle helmets out to iron Horse’s sidewalk, and asked passersby to pose for a mural. This is the finished product, and includes some cameos by our A+ craftsmen.
At some point on many of our bar-builds, I turned to Carter Anderson, a longtime friend who collected pieces of American iconography from old factories, yard sales and auctions. Carter’s eye for cool junk is second to none. He found half a rusting porcelain Firestone sign and an old speedway billboard which made our stairway the best in town.
Business at iron Horse dropped off a few years before the pandemic and we decided to partner with a friend Ryan Seelbach and let his team rebrand the bar as Boardwalk. Just as Boardwalk was gaining steam, we were crushed by the global pandemic and the bar was dead.
