It looked really cool, so I decided to check it out,” she said, sipping on a Miller Lite as her head turned to and fro amid the surroundings. She motored up from East Peoria to take her initial glimpse of the place. That description fit Laura Oggero, 50, on a recent Friday. “You can tell when newbies come, because they’re all looking up, and they’re wandering around,” Roggy said. Another is to check out décor they might’ve missed the first time or two. Most beers and drinks go for a mere $3, another reason patrons come back. Orders move fast, as do the drinks – in part because it’s cash only (though there’s an ATM on site). The food operation is manned by Thompson’s parents, Rick and Sue. She comes out with her girlfriends, and they’ll have lunch.” “My mom comes out every weekend,” Roggy said. As for grown-up patrons, many sport white hair. That’s not to say kids don’t dash about the wide property, especially in early afternoon. “I would say it morphed into kind of an adult Disneyland.” “We called it a biker bar initially,” said Roggy, 53, who owned a body shop in Princeton when he joined Thompson in creating Psycho Silo. Soon, word crackled through watering holes and other spots throughout the area: “Have you heard about Psycho Silo?” The laid-back feel and attitude, along with the garage-wall look and nighttime country and rock shows, lured in curiosity-seekers. “If it didn’t work out as a bar, we’d at least have a cool place to hang out.”īut it did work out as a bar, from the moment Psycho Silo opened in 2015. “We kind of called it a little clubhouse,” Thompson said. Or jump atop that chair, made from a tractor seat. Care to take a load off? There’s a bench over there, fashioned from a tailgate. Thompson then put his artistic flair to use in designing many of the surroundings. The added benefit was no costs to heat or cool the place. With no roof or full walls, he couldn’t keep the site open all seasons, so May through September it would be. His idea: From the elevator, build a wide bar with room for plenty of tables and chairs, kind of like a backyard deck on steroids. Thompson’s grand vision of an outdoor bar carried just a modest investment. He bought the elevator and the surrounding 20 acres, at the time a mass thicket of brush near U.S. He saw it not as left for dead but as a potential center post for an elaborate tree house, a dream that eventually started to come to fruition in 2012 when Thompson, now 50, owned an art studio in Princeton. Though trains still rumble by, the elevator shuttered in the 1950s.ĭuring his childhood in nearby Princeton, Thompson marveled at the old elevator, which he calls a silo. After a shootout that left one lawman dead, the thieves were captured.Īt the time, Langley hosted a grain elevator that served a freight line. The community claimed one instance of fame – or, rather, infamy – in 1914 when bandits struck a train in nearby Manlius but were cornered by a 200-man posse at Langley. “A lot of different things happen out here.”Īctually, a lot of nothing happened there for the longest time.įifty-five miles north of Peoria, Langley is an unincorporated blip of a burg that never grew to more than a few houses, generations ago. “There’s always good people, good food, a lot of bikes,” said Leroy Winchel of Hennepin. Newcomers are entranced by its novelty, but repeat guests always find something to hold their interest. Welcome to Psycho Silo, an all-ages experience that is one part gearhead museum, one part adult playhouse, one part concert venue. “We get babies,” said co-owner Troy Thompson. Meantime, in the gravel-and-grass parking areas, you’ll find motorcycles and minivans, moms with strollers and grandmothers with walkers, vehicles and visitors of all sorts. On the walls of the open-air operation, you’ll find hood ornaments, gas caps, license plates, tractor seats, hubcaps, exhaust pipes, headlamps, exhaust pipes and just about any vehicular accoutrement imaginable, a chockablock collection that altogether comes off as an explosion of highway pop art. “A junkyard meets a bar meets an old corn crib.” “I don’t even know how to tell ya,” he is apt to respond. Dave Roggy is never quite sure how to describe his place of business.
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