Corner Club is almost a paradigm or axis of Moscow bar life. Each bar in Moscow has its own history, culture, and character.
Mingles has its pool hall, room for big groups of friends and, at times, has a country demeanor. John’s Alley with its aged dive bar aesthetic and live music. At the Garden once lived a melting pot of people from each bar community, where one could always find a group of their friends at the bar’s lounge tables. The now closed Champions was a polarizing enigma, some loved it and many hated.
The Corner Club, often called the Club, can be described as many things- a sports bar, Greek life bar, watering hole- but hardly one thing in particular.
When asking several people how they would describe the Club, each could not find a concise answer. The place is simple: four walls of cinderblocks, several TVs on a wall, a bunch of tables and shuffleboard, but there always seems to be more to it.
On a Friday or Saturday night, one may be crammed in there, shoulder to shoulder, elbow to elbow, with a million and one students. Or, on a Tuesday afternoon, playing trivia with people of all walks of Moscow life while others enjoying the quiet of a summer evening having a drink on their patio looking up at the sky.
The Corner Club first opened in 1948, in a different building. Tthe building was to be destroyed in 1994 for the construction of the new highway, owner of the Corner Club Marc Trivelpiece explained, “They knew they were going to have to do that like in 80 and so they built (the current building) on the back end of it. So the original building’s steps would be where the center of the intersection is.”
It was opened by two friends at first to be just a men’s club where it was mainly a farmers and workers bar. This was until the 80s when it was passed to one of the sons of the original owners who turned the Club into the style of bar it is today.
“I worked here when I was in college, so I worked here from 96 to 99 and had a good relationship with the owners when they were ready to sell. My wife and I were ready to get out of the Boise-Meridian area and raise our kids up in this area. So, we ended up with the opportunity to move back up here and buy the bar,” Trivelpiece said.
The canonical story of the Corner Club has been and probably always will be the story of Gus Johnson, a basketball player for UI back in 1962-1963.
“He had an amazing ability to jump. The stories I’ve heard is that the students would stack quarters on top of the backboard at Memorial Gym, and he would jump and grab the quarters and that would be his drinking money. He came down here one day,” Trivelpiece said. “He’s standing there and just standing there in dress shoes and the owner asks if you can touch the beam and he goes ‘yeah.’”
The wooden beam used to stretch above the bar in the original building.
“So he stood in dress shoes, flat-footed off a wooden floor, jumped up and touched the beam. Depending on who you talked to somewhere between 11 feet 3 inches and 11 feet 7 inches,” Trivelpiece said. “So, the owner put up a nail in there so that anybody who could touch the spot could drink for free.”
The nail and beam were lost when the original Corner Club was demolished, but a representation was put back up in the current building in the spring of 2020, where one can still try to touch the nail.
Cory Summers can be reached at [email protected]