Charlotte’s Web: The Rockford Music Venue That Once Housed the City’s First Jewish Congregation

Rockford History | Music, architecture, and a vanished cultural landmark

There was a time when some of the most interesting music in Rockford could be heard inside an old church at 728 First Avenue. The building was home to Charlotte’s Web, a music venue that brought nationally known performers and local audiences together in an intimate setting.

But the history of Charlotte’s Web began nearly a century before its first concert.

Before it became a music venue, the building had served as a Swedish Methodist church and, later, as a synagogue for Rockford’s first Jewish congregation. Its history tells a story about immigration, religion, music, and the changing cultural life of the city.

From Swedish church to Jewish synagogue

The building that would eventually become Charlotte’s Web was erected in 1877 for a Swedish Methodist congregation. According to the Rockford Historical Society, the congregation later became known as Bethany Swedish Methodist Episcopal Church and constructed a new sanctuary at 402 Eighth Street.

Rockford’s Jewish community was also establishing its place in the growing city.

In 1898, the congregation Ohave Sholon was formed. Ten years later, in 1908, it purchased the former church building at 728 First Avenue for use as a synagogue.

This distinction is important: the building was not constructed as Rockford’s first synagogue, but it became a place of worship for the city’s first Jewish congregation.

For decades, the building's purpose was religious. Eventually, however, it would become a gathering place for an entirely different community.

The birth of Charlotte’s Web

In 1972, Karen Howard and Stephen Powers opened Charlotte’s Web in downtown Rockford. The venue became associated with folk music and a commitment to bringing a wide variety of performers to the city.

Charlotte’s Web was not simply another nightclub. Its programming encompassed folk, blues, roots music, and artists whose work did not always fit neatly into commercial categories.

The former house of worship offered something that larger concert halls could not easily reproduce: the experience of hearing a performer in a relatively intimate space.

For Rockford audiences, it meant that nationally recognized musicians could appear in a setting where the distance between artist and listener was unusually small.

The musicians who came to Rockford

                          

                          

                          

The list of performers associated with Charlotte’s Web demonstrates just how adventurous its programming could be.

Concert records document appearances by Cheap Trick in 1974, John Hartford and the Runaways in 1976, Asleep at the Wheel in 1979, and Loudon Wainwright III in 1980.

These were musicians from strikingly different traditions. Hartford was associated with bluegrass and American roots music. The Runaways were a young, all-female rock band. Cheap Trick was developing the sound that would eventually make the Rockford group internationally famous.

The variety was part of what made Charlotte’s Web distinctive. A listener might encounter a folk singer, a blues musician, or a rock band in the same room.

For a city better known nationally for manufacturing than for its music scene, Charlotte’s Web helped create a place where audiences could experience a much wider musical world.

Karen Howard and the people behind the music

Charlotte’s Web was also the product of sustained personal commitment.

Karen Howard led the organization for much of its existence. Her daughter, Lani Richardson, eventually succeeded her as executive director.

By 2012, Charlotte’s Web had operated independently for more than 40 years. That September, Northern Public Radio reported that the organization was becoming a division of the Mendelssohn Performing Arts Center.

Richardson explained that the partnership would help preserve Charlotte’s Web without requiring her family to continue handling nearly every aspect of its operations.

The arrangement represented another chapter in the organization’s history. Charlotte’s Web had grown beyond the old building on First Avenue, but its mission of bringing music to Rockford continued.

The building disappears

The original Charlotte’s Web building did not survive.

A November 10, 2019, account documented its demolition, including photographs of the former venue at 728 First Avenue.

With its disappearance, Rockford lost a building that had served several generations of residents in very different ways.

It had been a Swedish Methodist church, a synagogue, and a music venue. Each community had found its own reasons to gather there.

The history of the building also illustrates something easily overlooked about Rockford: its cultural life has always been shaped by people who created institutions for themselves, often adapting existing spaces to new purposes.

A building with more than one life

The story of Charlotte’s Web is about more than the famous musicians who performed there.

It is also the story of a Swedish immigrant congregation that built a church in the nineteenth century, a Jewish community that established a permanent place of worship in the early twentieth century, and a group of music lovers who transformed that same space into a gathering place for artists and audiences.

The building at 728 First Avenue is gone, but the history of what happened inside it remains part of Rockford’s story.

For a time, one old church held several different versions of the city’s cultural life.

And for those who remember Charlotte’s Web, the music is still there.

 

The 1928 Rockford Tornado: The Afternoon a Tornado Tore Through the City

On the afternoon of September 14, 1928, Rockford was struck by one of the deadliest tornadoes in the city's history. At approximately 3:20 p.m., a tornado touched down on the south side of Rockford, east of the Rock River and just south of Harrison Avenue. From there it began moving northeast, directly toward populated neighborhoods and some of Rockford's busiest industrial districts.

By the time it was over, 14 people were dead, at least 100 were injured, factories had partially collapsed, houses had been destroyed or moved from their foundations, and a trail of wreckage stretched out of Rockford and across the countryside toward Boone and McHenry counties. Nearly a century later, many of the streets along the tornado's route remain familiar Rockford addresses.

A "Huge Blue Curtain"

One of the remarkable things about the 1928 tornado is that eyewitness descriptions survive. Two men watching the storm approach described what they saw as a "huge blue curtain with small black dots." Those dots were almost certainly debris being carried through the air by the storm.

In 1928 there was no Doppler radar watching rotation develop over Winnebago County, no cell-phone alerts, and no outdoor warning system comparable to what Rockford residents know today. Tornado forecasting itself was still primitive. For many people in the tornado's path, the first warning was simply what they could see and hear approaching them.

After touching down south of Harrison Avenue, the tornado began damaging houses and farm buildings. Four people were injured when one house was badly damaged, and another person who had been caught outside was killed. The tornado then continued northeast toward one of the places where it could do the most damage: industrial Rockford.

Disaster at the Rockford Chair and Furniture Company

One of the worst tragedies occurred at Factory B of the Rockford Chair and Furniture Company along Peoples Avenue, west of Kishwaukee Street. The tornado struck the factory with tremendous force, collapsing the roof and multiple walls while workers were still inside. Eight people died at the factory and at least 40 more were injured.

Contemporary accounts describe rescuers digging through the ruined building looking for survivors. Employees from the nearby Chappel Brothers packing plant reportedly rushed to the scene and organized themselves into rescue squads. For a city whose identity and economy were deeply connected to furniture manufacturing, the destruction must have been particularly shocking. This wasn't a tornado crossing an empty field outside town. It was moving directly through the places where Rockford people worked.

Three Children Trying to Get Home

The tornado continued northeast across Kishwaukee Street and into residential neighborhoods. As it approached 7th Street, the damage became particularly severe, with houses destroyed or pushed from their foundations. Then came perhaps the most heartbreaking event of the afternoon.

A roof was ripped from a building and carried several blocks through the air. Three children who were attempting to get home were struck and killed by the falling debris. The tornado continued toward another of Rockford's major industrial areas, striking the National Lock Company, Union Furniture Company and Mechanics Machine Company along 18th Avenue.

At Union Furniture, portions of the roof and floors collapsed and two workers were killed. Elsewhere, windows shattered, walls collapsed, and businesses, houses, a service station and a grocery store were damaged or destroyed. The tornado was cutting diagonally through a working city filled with people who had begun the afternoon at factories, businesses, schools and homes with no idea of what was approaching.

Across Broadway and Toward Charles Street

The storm continued northeast. Near Broadway and 13th Street, the front wall of the National Furniture Company collapsed into the street, while the Elco Tool Company also suffered major structural damage. The tornado then crossed Woodruff Avenue and entered the Rockview neighborhood, where homes lost roofs, windows and siding.

Two houses were reportedly blown completely from their foundations and deposited in the middle of 9th Avenue near 19th Street. The Carlson Roofing Company building along Charles Street was destroyed. From there, the tornado began moving away from Rockford's densely populated neighborhoods and into the countryside.

Farms along State Street and Guilford Road were damaged as the storm continued northeast. It passed north of Poplar Grove and northwest of Capron before eventually reaching the vicinity of the Boone-McHenry county line. The known tornado path was approximately 26 miles long, and the entire event lasted only about 45 minutes.

And Then Came the Water

Rockford wasn't finished with the storm even after the tornado passed. The same severe weather produced flash flooding along Keith Creek. Roads flooded and buildings were surrounded by water, while photographs from the aftermath show automobiles sitting in floodwater and neighborhoods inundated along the creek.

Residents were therefore dealing with tornado wreckage and flooding at the same time. Hundreds of people were left homeless, and damage to factories temporarily deprived some Rockford families of their livelihoods. The Illinois National Guard's 129th Infantry Regiment was sent to Rockford to assist with the aftermath.

How Strong Was the 1928 Rockford Tornado?

The tornado is sometimes described as an F4. Tornado historian Thomas Grazulis later classified it at that level using the Fujita Scale, which would place it among exceptionally violent tornadoes. There is, however, an important wrinkle when attempting to rate a tornado that occurred decades before the Fujita Scale even existed.

The National Weather Service conducted a modern historical reassessment of the damage and determined that surviving evidence supports at least EF3-level damage. Photographs and written descriptions from 1928 cannot provide investigators with all the structural information available following a modern tornado, so assigning an exact modern rating nearly a century later inevitably involves some uncertainty.

Whatever label is attached to it, the physical results aren't ambiguous. Fourteen people died and at least 100 were injured. Factories collapsed, homes were destroyed, and parts of southeast and east Rockford were transformed in a matter of minutes.

Rockford's Invisible Tornado Path

Perhaps the strangest thing about the 1928 Rockford tornado today is how ordinary its path looks. Harrison Avenue, Kishwaukee Street, 7th Street, 18th Avenue, Broadway, Woodruff Avenue, Charles Street, State Street and Guilford Road aren't remote historical locations. They are streets thousands of Rockford residents still travel all the time.

Drive through southeast Rockford today and there is little to announce that, on a Friday afternoon in September 1928, a tornado crossed those same streets, demolished factories and houses, carried pieces of buildings through the air and killed people who had been going about an otherwise ordinary workday.

That's one of the peculiar things about local history. Eventually the wreckage gets cleared, buildings are repaired or replaced, factories disappear, streets change, and new houses and businesses arrive. The people who remember what happened grow old and disappear too. The city keeps moving, but underneath the Rockford we see every day is another Rockford composed entirely of things that happened in the same places before we got here.

On September 14, 1928, for about 45 minutes, one of those places was directly in the path of a tornado.

 

The Red Whale and the Ghosts of the 500 Block of East State Street

There are places in Rockford that disappear, and then there are places that disappear almost completely.

The Red Whale is one of the latter.

Sometime around the end of the 1960s or beginning of the 1970s, a head shop called The Red Whale operated in downtown Rockford. People remember it. Period sources prove that it existed. But finding the ordinary details we expect to find about an old business—an exact address, the owner's name, when it opened, when it closed—is surprisingly difficult.

What survives is a tantalizing combination of documentary evidence, local memory, and, perhaps, the ghost of a red whale still painted on a wall.

And the trail appears to lead to the 500 block of East State Street.

The Red Whale Was Real

Let's start with what can actually be documented.

In 1972, Rockford hosted a concert at the National Guard Armory featuring Quicksilver Messenger Service, Blue Öyster Cult and Flash, the British progressive-rock band featuring former Yes guitarist Peter Banks.

Tickets cost five dollars.

A contemporary newspaper account listed four Rockford businesses where tickets could be purchased: The Red Whale, Impulse Two, Budget Tapes and Records, and Team Electronics.

That's fairly compelling evidence of what kind of cultural territory The Red Whale occupied. This wasn't a hardware store that happened to have an unusual name. It was part of the network through which Rockford's young music audience encountered the counterculture of the early 1970s.

Another contemporary source takes us even farther outside Rockford.

An Illinois underground newspaper advertised a large concert featuring Dave Mason, the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, Pure Prairie League, Linda Ronstadt and David Blue. The advertisement listed ticket outlets around Illinois:

Peoria had Budget Tapes & Records.

Pekin had Freak Boutique.

Springfield had Right-On Boutique.

Decatur had Crystal Ship.

Macomb had Red Caboose.

And Rockford had:

RED WHALE.

The company The Red Whale kept on that list probably tells us as much about the store as anything else we've found. These were the record stores, boutiques and head shops through which the youth culture of the period moved.

The Red Whale was part of that world.

But Where Was It?

This is where history becomes considerably less cooperative.

I have not yet found a period city-directory entry, advertisement, telephone listing or other primary source that establishes the Red Whale's street address beyond reasonable doubt.

So what follows should be understood as Rockford oral history rather than established fact.

The persistent local recollection places The Red Whale in the 500 block of East State Street, apparently upstairs in one of the buildings now occupied by either Social Urban Bar & Restaurant at 509 E. State Street or Abreo at 515 E. State Street.

That distinction matters, and until somebody turns up a directory listing or advertisement, I don't think we should pretend to know which address it was.

But there is an intriguing piece of physical folklore attached to the story.

People who had access to the upstairs portion of one of these buildings years after The Red Whale disappeared reportedly could still see the outline of a large red whale painted on a wall.

If anyone reading this has actually seen that whale—or better yet photographed it—I would very much like to hear from you.

Because if that story can be confirmed, Rockford may have a surviving piece of counterculture history hiding above one of its most familiar downtown restaurants.

The 500 Block

Maybe that's why The Red Whale interests me.

I live on this block.

Today the 500 block of East State is part of the downtown Rockford most people recognize as the restaurant and nightlife district. Social is at 509 East State. Abreo is at 515 East State. They occupy old commercial buildings whose histories extend far beyond their current occupants.

The businesses change. The buildings remember.

The block The Red Whale may have inhabited would have looked out on a very different downtown Rockford.

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, downtown was still a genuine commercial center rather than a historic district trying to reinvent itself. State Street had department stores, restaurants, record stores, theaters, bars, clothing stores and all the strange little independent businesses that once occupied second floors and narrow storefronts in American downtowns.

And then the culture changed.

Long hair got longer. Psychedelic music arrived. Underground newspapers appeared. Incense burned. Black-light posters went up on bedroom walls. Rolling papers and pipes appeared beside records and leather goods.

Every decent-sized American city seemed to acquire a head shop.

Rockford apparently got a whale.

What Did They Sell?

Here again, caution is necessary.

Modern recollections specifically call The Red Whale a head shop, while another modern Rockford retrospective remembers it as one of the area's old record stores.

Those descriptions aren't contradictory.

A head shop around 1970 could sell records, posters, incense, jewelry, clothing, underground newspapers, patches, buttons and other counterculture merchandise alongside the smoking paraphernalia that gave the stores their name.

And we know The Red Whale sold—or at least distributed—concert tickets.

The surviving evidence therefore points toward something more interesting than simply a record store.

The Red Whale seems to have been one of the places where Rockford's emerging counterculture gathered.

A Store That Almost Disappeared From History

Here's the strange part.

Search for some long-gone Rockford businesses and you'll find photographs, advertisements, matchbooks, newspaper stories and dozens of people reminiscing about them.

The Red Whale barely exists online.

A Rockford-area record-store retrospective published decades later included it among ten remembered local record stores, but even the writer admitted he'd never heard of the place and asked readers for their memories.

In 2020, someone posted to the Rockford subreddit looking for information about “The Red Whale headshop” for an art project. They had apparently encountered exactly the same problem: they knew something had been there, but reliable information was difficult to find.

That's how local history disappears.

Not dramatically.

Nobody announces that a place is about to vanish from the historical record.

The sign comes down. Another business moves in. Somebody paints the room. The people who worked there move away or die. Photographs sit unidentified in boxes. Fifty years pass.

Eventually everyone knows somebody who remembers the place, but nobody can remember exactly where it was.

Somewhere Upstairs, a Whale

And that's why I keep coming back to that story about the wall.

Maybe someone will read this and say:

Of course it was at 509. I bought a poster there in 1971.

Maybe someone else still has a Red Whale shopping bag, business card, matchbook, newspaper advertisement or photograph.

Maybe a former employee is still in Rockford.

Maybe somebody knows who owned it.

And maybe, somewhere upstairs at 509 or 515 East State Street, beneath half a century of paint and renovation, there really is still the faint outline of a whale.

For now, that's where the historical record ends.

The Red Whale definitely existed.

It was operating in Rockford by 1972.

It was associated with records, the head-shop culture and major rock-concert ticket sales.

Local recollection places it somewhere in the 500 block of East State, likely in the building now occupied by Social or Abreo, although I have not yet found documentary evidence establishing which one.

And according to Rockford lore, long after the people and the merchandise were gone, the whale was still on the wall.

That's not quite enough evidence to close the case.

But it's more than enough reason to keep looking.

 

The Faust Hotel: When Rockford Had a Grand Hotel

Greetings from Rockford, Illinois.

For years I could look out my north window and see two of downtown Rockford's great survivors: the Midway Theatre and the Faust Hotel.

I found some old postcards of the Faust on eBay one day and was struck by something unusual about them. The building in the postcards was obviously from another Rockford — a city of grand hotels, ballrooms, visiting dignitaries and men who apparently packed suits to go bowling — but the building itself was still right there outside my window.

That is one of the peculiar things about the Faust. Rockford changed around it.

The Faust didn't go anywhere.

Rockford Builds a Skyscraper

The Faust Hotel opened in 1929 at 630 East State Street, an enormous undertaking for a city that was becoming one of the Midwest's important manufacturing centers.

Behind the project was Levin Faust, a Swedish immigrant who arrived in Rockford in 1887 and went to work as a machinist at W.F. & John Barnes Company. Faust became one of the city's successful industrialists and investors, helping organize or finance businesses including Mechanics Machine Company, Rockford Drop Forge, Rockford Tool Company, Rockford Milling Machine and Estwing Manufacturing. He also served as president of the Rockford Park District board.

Then he decided Rockford needed a hotel.

Not just a hotel.

A hotel.

The completed Faust towered over East State Street and became the city's premier lodging and social destination. It contained hundreds of guest rooms, restaurants, ballrooms and lounges.

And, yes, a bowling alley.

An eight-lane bowling alley, in fact.

This was apparently an era when civilization understood that no luxury hotel was truly complete unless a guest could finish dinner, attend a formal dance, drink several cocktails and then attempt to pick up a 7-10 split without ever leaving the building.

Unfortunately for Levin Faust, he picked possibly the worst year in American history to open an enormous luxury hotel.

1929. 
      

The Great Depression devastated the venture. Faust lost the hotel in bankruptcy in 1933 along with much of his fortune. He died three years later.

The hotel bearing his name survived him.

When Presidents Came to Rockford

For decades, if you were important and came to Rockford, there was a pretty good chance somebody was going to put you in the Faust.

Dwight D. Eisenhower stayed there.

John F. Kennedy visited the Faust during his 1960 presidential campaign.

Swedish royalty came through its doors, an especially significant event in a city whose history was so profoundly shaped by Swedish immigration. Prince Bertil of Sweden was guest of honor at a banquet there in 1938.

The Faust became more than someplace to sleep. It was where Rockford presented itself to the outside world.

This is easy to forget now.

We tend to look at old buildings as architecture. But buildings like the Faust were also stages. Weddings happened there. Business deals happened there. Conventions, banquets, dances, political events and celebrations happened there. People arrived in Rockford and formed part of their impression of the city inside that building.

For a substantial part of the twentieth century, the Faust was Rockford's living room.

The Postcards

One of my favorite old postcards shows the Faust lobby.

The funny thing is that when I used to walk past it almost every day, I always thought it looked remarkably similar.

I have occasionally wondered whether it might actually be the same carpet.

This is Rockford, so I am unwilling to rule that out without further investigation.

Other postcards show the lounges and public rooms during the hotel's glory years, when downtown Rockford was crowded with theaters, department stores, restaurants and hotels.

Just down East State stood the Midway Theatre. The Coronado was on the other side of downtown. The Register Star's tower rose beside the river. At night the Faust itself announced its presence in enormous illuminated letters high above the street.

The building wasn't merely located in downtown Rockford.

It helped define what downtown Rockford looked like.

Did JFK Bowl at the Faust?

This brings us to the important historical questions.

There really was a bowling alley inside the Faust.

John F. Kennedy really was at the Faust.

Therefore, it is technically possible that John F. Kennedy bowled at the Faust Hotel.

I have uncovered absolutely no evidence that this occurred.

It also seems unlikely that bowling would have ranked especially high among the entertainment opportunities available to John F. Kennedy in 1960.

Still, until someone produces documentary evidence establishing his whereabouts during every minute of his Rockford visit, I prefer to consider the matter unresolved.

Rockford historians deserve mysteries too.

From the Faust to Tebala Towers

The age of the grand downtown hotel eventually ended.

In 1973 the building was purchased by Rockford's Tebala Shriners and became known as Tebala Towers. Later in the decade, the former hotel was converted into apartments.

Eventually its old name returned.

Today it is the Faust Landmark, a residential building rather than a hotel.

But the old hotel is still visible everywhere once you know what you're looking at.

The building still dominates East State Street. Its brick and terra-cotta exterior still rises above downtown. And more than ninety years after it opened, the Faust remains one of the most immediately recognizable structures in Rockford.

In fact, despite generations of predictions about Rockford's future, nobody has managed to build anything taller.

The Light at the Top of the Faust

Years ago, while I was still living where I could see the Faust from my window, I noticed something one night.

A light was on in one of the uppermost rooms.

I had never seen it illuminated before.

Naturally, I imagined that some super-secret ancient society sworn to protect Rockford had convened an emergency meeting at the top of the Faust.

Perhaps they had been meeting there since 1929.

Industrialists. Newspaper publishers. Politicians. Swedish royalty. Phantom Regiment elders. Possibly a Sock Monkey representative.

They would assemble only when the city faced its greatest dangers.

The only problem was that I couldn't think of anyone currently in Rockford who would be summoned to such a meeting.

So it was probably maintenance.

But I prefer my version.

Because the Faust has earned a little mythology.

It has watched Rockford celebrate and struggle for nearly a century. It survived the Depression that destroyed the fortune of the man who built it. It watched presidents arrive and businesses disappear. It watched downtown empty out and begin filling up again. It watched theaters close, factories vanish and generations of Rockfordians come and go beneath its windows.

And it's still there.

The old postcards aren't really pictures of a vanished building.

They're pictures of a vanished Rockford surrounding a building that refused to vanish.

Right here in downtown Rockford, Illinois.

 

Der Rathskeller: 88 Years of German Food on Auburn Street

For generations of Rockford residents, you hardly needed to give directions to Der Rathskeller. You just said 1132 Auburn Street.

Der Rathskeller opened there in 1931, when Fred Goetz, a Wisconsin native of German descent, established a sausage shop and delicatessen on Rockford's North End. What began as a small neighborhood business grew into one of Rockford's longest-running and most recognizable restaurants, serving German food from the same Auburn Street location for 88 years.

The menu became part of the institution: sausages, sauerkraut, schnitzel, German potatoes, sandwiches and beer. By 2010, local tourism materials were still describing Der Rathskeller as a Rockford favorite where "German ancestry" showed through in both its lunch sandwiches and traditional family-style German dinners.

The Rathskeller Rockford. Ya, ya, ya. 

But Der Rathskeller was one of those Rockford places where the building, atmosphere and accumulated memories mattered almost as much as the food.

For roughly four decades, the restaurant was owned by former Rockford schoolteacher and principal Betty Giesen. Under Giesen, Der Rathskeller became firmly embedded in North End life. She added the restaurant's outdoor beer garden in 2009, creating another feature that would become closely identified with the place. When Giesen retired in 2016, her son Mike DuPre took over and operated Der Rathskeller for another three years.

And then there was the commercial.

For decades, Rockford radio listeners heard a polka-backed Der Rathskeller jingle performed in an exaggerated German accent by local radio engineer Chuck Ingle. The advertisement became so familiar that generations of Rockfordians could probably have recited the address without ever looking it up:

1132 Auburn Street.

And, inevitably:

Yah, yah, yah.

The commercial became one of those peculiar bits of shared Rockford culture — something meaningless to almost anyone from somewhere else but instantly recognizable to people who grew up here.

Like many old Rockford institutions, Der Rathskeller even accumulated a ghost story. Tales circulated that founder Fred Goetz occasionally returned to keep an eye on things in the basement. Whether Goetz ever actually punched in for the supernatural night shift is another question, but a restaurant doesn't stay in the same place for nearly nine decades without acquiring a few stories.

The original Der Rathskeller closed in December 2019 after 88 years in business. There was hope that the closing wouldn't be permanent, and new owners purchased the property the following spring. After extensive renovations, the restaurant reopened in October 2020 as Rathskeller Rockford.

The timing could hardly have been worse.

Opening a restaurant during the COVID-19 pandemic proved an uphill battle, and the revived Rathskeller closed in October 2021, just one year and 13 days after reopening. The Auburn Street building then sat vacant for more than three years.

But 1132 Auburn Street wasn't finished being a restaurant.

In 2024, the property was purchased by Barbara and Claudio Pennacchi. Their daughter Lia Pennacchi and her husband, chef Chase Williams, transformed the historic space into Plume, an upscale-casual restaurant specializing in the cuisine of Northern Italy, particularly the traditions of Emilia-Romagna, where the Pennacchi family has roots. Plume opened June 19, 2024.

Plume

The cuisine changed from German to Italian, but the new owners didn't try to erase what had come before them. Original Der Rathskeller artifacts, including an old liquor license and menu, were preserved as part of the building's story. The old beer garden became Plume's patio and spritz bar.

That's probably a fitting fate for one of Rockford's great restaurant addresses.

Restaurants disappear. Menus change. Owners retire. Signs come down. The places that survive longest aren't necessarily preserved exactly as they were.

Sometimes the building survives because somebody finds another reason for people to gather there.

More than 90 years after Fred Goetz opened his sausage shop and delicatessen, people are still going out for dinner at 1132 Auburn Street.

The food is Italian now.

But Rockford still knows the address.