Looming over the bar at the former Sgt. Preston's rests a large, picturesque piece of stained glass. Its ornate design, depicting a kaleidoscopic wilderness, wouldn't be entirely out of place in a church. I had never noticed it before.
"It was here the whole time," said new co-owner Matty O'Reilly.
When he and Rick Guntzel bought the aging Seven Corners bar last month, a long banner with the words "PIZZA BUFFET" covered the multicolored glass, which had been above the bar for three decades. They tore down the banner immediately.
They removed a lot more, too. O'Reilly said they must have taken down 45 neon beer signs and maybe 200 liquor posters. The more they stripped away, the more they liked what they saw. Three weeks ago they reopened the Minneapolis pub under its new name: Republic.
The former bar was famous for its "fishbowl" community cocktails -- 100-ounce mixtures of pure inebriation served in a plastic fishbowl. O'Reilly and Guntzel ditched the concoctions. Take away a college student's fishbowl and there's no telling what they might do. O'Reilly said old regulars got a little peeved.
The bar owner isn't used to being greeted with animosity. In the past six years he's turned around two ailing establishments, transforming both -- the 318 Cafe in Excelsior and the Aster Cafe at St. Anthony Main -- into hot music venues with a taste for great food and drinks. His goal with Republic is to give Seven Corners craft beer and pub food at prices that are friendly to penny-pinching college students (and penny pinchers everywhere).
O'Reilly and Guntzel also took down nine flat-screen TVs and removed the arcade games. A couple of things they didn't throw in the trash: the animal mounts, including the giant moose head, buffalo, bear, buck and what looks like a Bambi.
"Our entire vision is we don't want to alienate people who were coming here, but I think we'll attract people who weren't coming here, too," O'Reilly said.