The story of 211 Cowesett Avenue is a story of men who worked with their hands and fought with their fists, a story singed by fire, doused with booze, and propped up by dreams that tumbled as inevitably as water through the raceway of a cotton mill.
Bankruptcy, arson, murder, and brotherly strife haunted the West Warwick nightclub long before Feb. 20, when the worst fire in the history of the state destroyed it.
A flat-topped wooden gin mill rising out of an old farmer's cornfield, it was never much to look at, even when Casey Lada and his brother Henry opened it in 1946.
But the unassuming appearance didn't stop more than a dozen owners from seeing opportunity there. Some spent their fortunes chasing their dreams. Few caught them.
Organist Julio Gionti dreamed of opening a club with a big bandstand and a real brass rail along the bar. He cleaned the place up, installing spotlights on the dance floor that he could control from his perch at the electric keyboard as he cranked out "Stardust," "Body And Soul," and other old standards.
"Good music," he remembers, "not like the junk they got now, with all the noise."
Julio's had been open for only a few weeks, when he was stricken with a mysterious illness. "He dropped face down on the keyboard," recalls Michael Muksian, his business partner at the time. "He couldn't play no more."
So Gionti packed up his keyboard and quit. Most of the customers left with him. Weeks later, the place was gutted in a suspicious fire.
That was 1971; Julio Gionti is 70 now. After a quadruple bypass, he can't lug the keyboard around anymore. But from his home in Coventry he still longs for the kind of place Julio's was meant to be "I think we would have done a real good business," he says.
But the dream fell prey to the nightclub's bad luck, he says. "That place is jinxed."
Brotherly strife
On the day before Thanksgiving, 1945, Rhode Island was preparing for its first holiday season since the surrender of Germany and Japan. Shiploads of men were returning from Europe and the Pacific. Households were scrambling for government-rationed sugar, bread, and milk.
Crompton, a village of Polish natives and their offspring, sent many of its young men to the war. The factory houses around the velvet mill on the south branch of the Pawtuxet River were peppered with the blue stars signifying a son overseas, and with the gold stars announcing that one more son would not return.
Kames "Casey" Lada had been home from the Pacific for nearly three months. A surgical technician attached to the 103rd Infantry Regiment, his job was to rush into combat, unarmed, and carry the wounded off the field. He saw action in New Guinea, the Philippines, and the Northern Solomons. He was wounded himself in March, less than six months before his honorable discharge. The 29-year-old came back to Crompton that fall with a Purple Heart and a dream.
He wanted to build a nightclub, a cozy place where he could entertain the friends he hadn't seen for four years. "He was dreaming of this, even when he was out there fighting," remembers Helen Piasczyk, who was then Lada's neighbor.
Casey and his brother picked a spot just outside of Crompton, buying two-thirds of an acre of cornfield from Ludwik and Mary Piasczyk, helen's future in-laws. They paid $1,650.
Those who remember Casey Lada recall a kind and soft-spoken man, with brown hair and hazel eyes, who had left school after the seventh grade. Tall and wiry, he played basketball and was an ace first baseman for the Polish National Alliance baseball team.
His brother, Henry "Pinhead" Lada, had been one of the few able-bodied men of Crompton to stay behind during the war, earning overtime as a truck driver for the Warwick Chemical Co. "We used to laugh at him," Piasczyk recalls, because the Army had turned him away for being flat-footed.
Known for a quiet, even sullen, demeanor, he earned the name Pinhead for being less quick-witted than his younger, more popular brother.
The restaurant was the younger brother's dream; why Henry Lada got involved is anybody's guess. But the brothers went into business as equal partners, sharing the costs of building the restaurant in the spring of 1946. Henry oversaw the construction, and Casey kept the books. They named it Casey's Inn.
Trouble started almost as soon as the first customer walked in. By December, a disagreement about money began to break the brothers apart. Casey wanted out. He sued his older brother in Superior Court, complaining that "differences have arisen" between them, and asking to liquidate the business.
In court papers, Henry answered by accusing Casey of cooking the restaurant's books to the tune of $5,000, three times what they'd paid for the land.
It was a turbulent time for the Lada family. Casey was newly married, and a cancer was growing that would kill him two years later. After a hearing before a judge the following spring, Casey washed his hands of the place and walked away, his dream abandoned.
Henry was left with a bar that had been his brother's dream; it even bore his brother's name. He renamed it "The Wheel," and brought in his wife, Laura, to help. They kept it going for nearly two decades. They even lived in the back room -- with their young son, Henry Jr. -- when they lost their rented rooms on Pulaski Street in Crompton.
"It was stinky in there, and when the sailors started coming in, it was noisy and rowdy. I didn't like the environment," says Helen Piasczyk, who as a teenager worked there one summer as a coat-check girl. "But they were good to me. If I didn't make five dollars checking coats, Laura would take my change and give me a five-dollar bill."
Central Rhode Island was crawling with sailors from Quonset and Davisville in those days. On Fridays and Saturday nights, the Navy men -- many of them Seabee construction workers -- would leave their shipyards and airstrips for West Warwick's central business district, Arctic, with its three movie houses and innumerable bars. When night fell they ruled the streets and the dance halls.
The Seabees came to Arctic along Route 3, making 211 Cowesett Ave. the perfect place for a roadside saloon with "select liquors," plenty of parking, and a live band. Between sets, Henry would climb up on the little wooden stage and play polkas on his accordion.
Before too long, The Wheel developed a reputation. "If you were looking for somewhere to go for action, that was the place to go, whether it was women or fistfights," recalls Walter Roarke, a member of the Crompton Veterans Organization and one of its unofficial historians. He remembers bellying up to the bar when he got back from the service in 1957.
The Ladas must have had some pull with the local authorities, Roarke speculates, because The Wheel stayed open -- it was even used as a polling place -- despite brawls, underage drinking, and rumors of prostitution.
"It was a known fact that he'd import them from Providence," Roarke says. "Ladies of the night."
Theodore J. "Pop" Popinski, a lifelong Crompton resident, remembers Henry Lada as a friend of Arthur Groleau, police chief from 1948 to 1969.
In 1951, two black men walked into the bar and ordered drinks. "We don't serve colored people," a bartender reportedly told them. The men, civilian workers at the Navy base, sued Henry Lada for racial discrimination, saying the ordeal had caused them headaches and emotional trauma. Lada countered that they weren't served because they were rowdy, not because they were black. The case ended in a mistrial in l955.
The Ladas sold the place in l964 and moved to Florida.
Cops and thugs
Shots rang out on Cowesett Avenue one hot night in 1969, intended for the proprietor of the seedy nightclub known in those days as the Doll House.
Joseph P. Muschiano Jr. left his friends -- two off-duty state police detectives -- at the bar and ran to the front door. He reached it in time to see two more flashes of gunfire erupt from a yellow sports car as it peeled out of the parking lot. A total of five rounds from a .38-caliber revolver had slammed into Muschiano's bar.
Muschiano, known as Joe the Barber, was no stranger to "Mafia wise guys" like the ones who he says peppered the place with bullets that night. One of the suspects in the shooting later apologized. "Believe it or not, we became very close friends," he says.
It is a typical Joe the Barber story. At 31, he was a barber, sewer contractor, and restaurateur on equally good terms with town solicitors and Mob underlings. The taps at his ramshackle roadhouse flowed as freely for the state troopers to whom he gave free haircuts as they did for the organized-crime figures who showed up on Monday nights to listen to some old-time organ music. "It was cops and robbers in those days," says one Crompton native who remembers Muschiano's nightclub.
Visitors for years afterward would reach under the bar and feel for the bullet holes in the beer cooler.
Muschiano bought the club in the spring of 1967, undertaking a budget-conscious renovation. Standing on sawhorses, he and his friends laid a fresh coat of paint on the low ceiling. He bought a load of cedar pickets and nailed them to the interior wall, christening the place the Cedar Acres Inn.
On the night of Cedar Acres' grand opening, the well failed. Muschiano walked up Kulas Road to his closest neighbor's house, walked in, and threw a wad of bills on the kitchen table. "I need your water," he told Helen Piasczyk, the former coat-check girl who had moved there recently with her husband, Leon. Muschiano ran a rubber hose from the house to the bar and kept it running all winter, despite grumblings from the Piasczyks.
Cedar Acres was a country & western joint, billed as "home of the original Italian smorgasbord." On Saturday nights crowds stopped in to catch the sounds of Eddie Zack, the Armenian Cowboy, and the Hayloft Jamboree. "I used to turn at least 100 people away on a Saturday night," Muschiano recalls, "after they left the Warwick Musical Theater."
On Mondays, Muschiano would hire Julio Gionti to play Italian tunes on his keyboard. That's the reason, he says, that his place became known as a hangout for tough guys from Federal Hill -- guys who also hung out at the Hollywood Inn (now Evelyn's Villa) down the street. Muschiano says Betty Ouimette, then the wife of mob enforcer Gerard T. Ouimette, was a waitress at Cedar Acres for a while.
Muschiano eventually changed the name of the place to The Doll House and started playing rock 'n' roll, but the tawdry reputation persisted.
He hired a bartender, James J. Caprio, a ladies' man with a foul mouth who hailed from Federal Hill, and a pretty waitress, a divorcee named Irene M. Oberlander.
"James and Irene used to go out, nothing serious, but they went out," Muschiano says.
Caprio was eventually fired and took a job at another bar; Oberlander stayed at the Doll House and took up with Ronald J. Parenteau, a Coventry police officer.
One night, Parenteau was visiting Oberlander when he saw Caprio sitting at the bar. The two men confronted each other near the jukebox. Threats were made. Each had friends to back him up. One witness remembered Parenteau pulling his gun.
Fearing a full-blown brawl, Muschiano stepped between them and ushered them into the kitchen. "I tried to settle the argument," he says. They stayed in there for a long time, talking, while Muschiano brought them drinks and kept their friends away. When they came out, they were laughing and talking like old friends, one witness later told the police.
But on June 2, 1969, Caprio's body was found in the back seat of his tan Cadillac in rural Connecticut, the victim of an execution-style shooting with a 12-gauge shotgun. Weeks later, the state police seized such a shotgun from the Coventry Police Department's arsenal. Parenteau and four other officers -- the entire night shift of the department -- were eventually implicated in the murder. Four were convicted of murder and served prison sentences; a fifth, charged as an accessory, was acquitted.
About a week after Caprio's body was found, Muschiano closed the Doll House. It was the only way he could think of to quit drinking, he says.
Curtains for the Red Fox Inn
Sailors, cops, wise guys. The bar at 211 Cowesett Ave. always catered to tough men.
Jeanne L. Petrarca wanted to give it a woman's touch. In 1970, Jeanne and her husband, Charles, bought the vacant club and undertook extensive renovations of the filthy interior. They pried Muschiano's cedar pickets off the walls. She picked new tableware in a handsome pattern and hung curtains in the windows.
To discourage the raffish crowd that used to hang out there, the Petrarcas removed the bar and put in more tables. They called the new place the Red Fox Inn.
They succeeded. The tough guys didn't come in anymore.
In fact, nobody came.
"We tried to make a family restaurant out of it, and it was a financial disaster. It just didn't last very long," Charlie Petrarca remembers.
After a few months of slow business, they changed the name to Tammany Hall and sunk even more money into it. Still, no one came. They fell behind on the mortgage payments. Barely a year after the Petrarcas bought it, the bank took it over. Charlie went bankrupt. Eventually, the couple divorced.
More than thirty years later, the disappointment is still fresh in Charlie Petrarca's voice. "I ended up with nothing," he says.
Mysterious illness, mysterious fire
After the bank takeover, the club fell into the hands of Michael Muksian, who was also running the Helm in Warwick, and Robert G. Pariseault, a lawyer who was later charged with selling knockoff Luis Vuitton purses in violation of a court order.
Muksian hired Gionti, the popular organist, to attract customers. "I had a lot of friends, still do," Gionti says. "All my friends came."
Gionti wasn't an investor, but he was the linchpin for the whole operation, and his name hung on the sign out front. "Depending on how business was," he says, "they were going to treat me accordingly."
But Gionti's mysterious illness struck, and he quit playing after just a few weeks. The owners had trouble finding entertainers and attracting customers, and the business struggled to stay afloat.
Then, at 1:35 one morning, a fire alarm sounded at Julio's. Firefighters who arrived there found the place engulfed in flames. They chopped holes in the roof to contain the fire, but the interior and all the furniture was badly charred. Entering through the front door, investigators found gasoline canisters lying all over the inside of the gutted club.
Muschiano, the former owner, was one of the first people there.
"They juiced the joint!" he said, within earshot of a Journal reporter.
Who actually owned the club at the time was as fuzzy as how it caught on fire. A corporation, Miro Realty, controlled by Muksian and Pariseault, owned the land. Muksian and Gionti's name appeared on the liquor license. A Warwick man named James Murray told reporters he'd bought the business a week before the fire, hoping to call it the Red Baron Inn and cater to teenagers if the General Assembly followed through with a plan to lower the drinking age to 18.
Murray had hired Muschiano as his bar manager, and said he and Muschiano had been at the bar "interviewing prospective bands and booking talent agents" until early that morning, minutes before the fire broke out.
And Harvey C. Simmons, the former Coventry police chief who lost his job after the Caprio murder scandal and later found work in Muschiano's real estate office, told a Journal reporter that he'd tried to buy the club a few weeks before the fire "for a West Warwick businessman whose business is in receivership and who couldn't put up the money himself."
No arson charges were ever filed.
Air guitars, strippers, spaghetti by the pound
Crompton was changing. The Seabee base at Davisville closed, along with the Quonset Point Naval Air Station, taking with them the sailors who had been the mainstay of West Warwick's nightlife. The new Warwick malls devastated the Arctic shopping mecca, the movie houses closed or turned to porn flicks, and the textile mills continued to decline. Suburban developments sprouted in the woods and farm fields around the village of Crompton.
During this era, 211 Cowesett Ave. achieved something like middle-class respectability, when a couple of Italian men opened a family restaurant where you could get spaghetti for six bucks a pound.
"It was the most successful Italian restaurant in Rhode Island at the time," says Edward A. Carosi, who co-ran P. Brillo and Sons for a year, before selling his share to partner Raymond J. Villanova.
Who was Papa Brillo? Just a name they liked the sound of, Carosi says.
Villanova never sold the land. A partnership controlled by his daughter still owns the 2/3-acre site that the Lada brothers bought in l945. But Villanova got rid of the business in the mid '80s, leasing the building to a former Brillo's manager, Glenn M. Madden, who ran it for a little while as Glenn's Pub, a banquet hall and sports bar.
In the late '80s, Glenn's Pub closed. In 1991, a nightclub called Crackerjacks opened, featuring hard-rock cover bands and candy-flavored shots of liqueur in plastic test tubes. Off-duty carpenters drank bottles of Bud and turned pool cues into air guitars.
When Raymond P. "Skip" Shogren took over and changed the name to the Filling Station, he revamped the menu, so that customers could order a "spare tire" (8 oz. hamburger) with a side order of "battery acid" (homemade chili). He sold the place to Howard J. Julian, who once hosted a male dance ensemble that stripped down to G-strings. He got a formal reprimand from the Town Council.
Brothers Jeffrey and Michael Derderian, young professionals who grew up in Warwick, bought the bar, renamed The Station, in March 2000. They pledged to continue bringing "name brand entertainment to the town of West Warwick," and rearranged the interior to accommodate bigger crowds.
On Feb. 20, The Station burned to the ground, killing 100 patrons and employees, a tragic end foreshadowed by decades of rotten luck, starting with a bitter feud between another pair of brothers, Casey and Henry Lada. The music and dancing is gone forever, the old cornfield exposed for the first time in 57 years, and the chain of disappointments that began with a wartime dream has finally come to an end.
Staff writer Zachary R. Mider can be reached at 277-8068 or zmider@projo.com.
DIGITAL EXTRA: Recap coverage of The Station fire and its aftermath, visit a memorial to its victims, view photos, documents and more at:
http://projo.com/extra/2003/stationfire/
