We are still actively looking for a building for Lost Art Press that will serve as a woodworking laboratory, a home for a burgeoning library, photo studio and a place to live.
I’m investigating properties in the Covington and Newport areas every month, but I am picky and am in no hurry. This will be the place where I hope to die while standing at my bench, so I want a lot of natural northern light for that event. Hardwood floors. Exposed brick.
But in the back of my mind I’ve always wondered about taking over the Gatehouse Tavern, a long-closed medieval-themed restaurant and bar that was built during the medieval restaurant craze of the 1970s.
The Gatehouse Tavern is on one of my running routes and is part of a massive complex of faux half-timbered restaurants, a hotel, convention center, salon, offices and swimming pools in Fort Mitchell, Ky. The hotel was called The Drawbridge, and it was one of the odd centers of community in our town. Elvis look-alike convention? They’d book the Drawbridge. Mannequin convention? Cross-stitching dominatrixes? Yup. All here.
In recent years, the Drawbridge had fallen on hard times and was closed sometime last year. They sold all the suits of armor, tapestries, wooden indians and wacky shields during a fire sale this fall.
The Gatehouse Tavern (or as I call it, Castle Brown) is on the edge of the campus. It has a moat – a fricking moat – plus giant doors. And some tiny towers from which we could defend the deep fryers. I always wondered what they would sell this derelict masterpiece for.
Now I’ll never know. They’ve chained off the entire campus to tear it down and redevelop it as something more modern.
Oh well. Dumb idea anyway.
— Christopher Schwarz