VIPs get a peek inside long-closed Fagiani's Bar

By KEVIN COURTNEY
Napa Valley Register

For two hours Saturday afternoon, the doors to Fagiani’s Bar, locked tight for a third of a century, opened, allowing 100 or so invited guests to explore a downtown time capsule.

They entered a 1940s working man’s bar, complete with beady-eyed deer heads and a Bromo Seltzer dispenser on the wall.

Practically everything in the neighborhood has been modernized or torn down since the bar closed in 1976. Even the riverfront has been made over.

But not Fagiani’s. Not yet.

The new owners, Steve and Johanna Hasty, had sent out e-mails inviting city officials and others for a final glimpse of this Main Street landmark before it is seismically retrofitted and turned into a restaurant.

The private showing of Fagiani’s bar was a hot ticket, stirring in many a perverse curiosity. Anita Andrews, a Fagiani daughter, was murdered there in 1974, a homicide that has never been solved. Her sister’s death prompted Muriel Fagiani, a legendary presence at city government meetings, to close the bar two years later.

Once inside, guests’ ghoulish expectation fell away. Most fell in thrall at traveling back in time to a Napa that is no more.

“This is awesome. This is a treasure,” said Napa Councilman Jim Krider, who could hardly believe the ultra-subdued lighting, suggesting a subterranean cavern. “This is the kind of place where people go to drink.”

“This is Napa back in the day. This is Napa as it was,” said Gordon Huether, a city planning commissioner. “I wish that the walls could speak.”

Looking at Fagiani’s long bar of Philippine mahogany with seating for nearly two dozen, Huether said he was reminded that Napa was once a “rough and tumble town,” with bars along the length of Main Street.

For Kristie Sheppard, executive director of the Napa County Historical Society, the chance to tour Fagiani’s was better than a trip to Disneyland.

She walked in awe through the pantry, past full cases of Coca-Cola and a bottle of Cold Duck that likely lost their fizz decades ago. Shelves of upside-down cocktail glasses were coated with dust.

“I’m not as creeped out as I thought I would be,” Sheppard said. Not wanting to miss a single historical detail, she furiously took notes.

How remarkable, she said, that the original linoleum on the floor of the upstairs meeting hall exactly matches the original linoleum in the historical society’s home, the Goodman Library.

“It’s majestic,” said Juliana Inman, a city planning commissioner and architect. Best of all, “it’s all fixable,” she said.

As Steve Hasty told the story, Nicola Fagiani, an Italian immigrant, bought 813 Main St. at the end of World War II. He converted the two-story building of native sandstone and brick into the bar that exists today. “It’s a 1945 bar. Literally, things haven’t changed there since 1945,” Hasty said.

Rebecca Yerger, a local historian, climbed 23 steep steps to the second floor meeting hall. Brightly lit by big windows overlooking the new Veteran’s Memorial Park and the river, the hall looked decked out for Halloween, with creepy shards of wallpaper hanging from the ceiling.

The upstairs hall opened with the building in 1904, one of many downtown meeting spots for social organizations, Yerger said. The upstairs had its own kitchen. An ancient bingo card lay on the food counter.

To get ready for Saturday’s reception, Hasty said, “I dusted the front bar and cleaned the floor a little bit so people could feel comfortable eating.”

More importantly, he persuaded Muriel Fagiani to drop by and share memories of Fagiani’s in its heyday. Even at the last minute, Hasty said he wasn’t sure if Muriel, who had kept her building locked up for decades, would come.

She did come. She hung out for more than two hours as a who’s who of Napa came up and expressed their astonishment at the history she had preserved and alluded most tenderly to the sad thing that had happened there.

“Poppa’s bar was a men’s bar,” Muriel said. Workers from Basalt Rock and Mare Island Naval Shipyard would come, cash their checks and stay a while. For those getting off a graveyard shift, Fagiani’s opened at 6 a.m.

Rep. Mike Thompson, D-St. Helena, who had earlier spoken at the rededication of Veteran’s park, asked Muriel if the deer on the wall were black tail or mule deer.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” said Muriel. Her uncle Andrew, once a county supervisor, probably shot them on a hunting trip to Montana or Idaho, she said.

Her dad, known as Nick, ran a simple operation — mostly drinks, with a token amount of food to satisfy the liquor laws, she said.

Her dad tried to keep up with the times, which is why he covered the original facade with red and blue Art Moderne tiles in 1945, Muriel said. Later, when other downtown bars added cocktail glasses to their neon signs, he did the same.

 When all the other bars were getting pool tables, he did too. A pool trophy behind the bar reads, “Napa City, 1968 Half Champion, Fagiani’s Bar.”

The Fagiani’s bar sign now sits on the floor of the bar. Muriel said she was keeping it.

Anyone who knew Main Street in the 40s wouldn’t recognize it today, Muriel said. It was wall-to-wall stores, bars and hotels, with no parking lots and no views of the river, she said.

“There used to be six to eight bars. People would start at one and work on down. Main Street was the place to be. You could come down and see all your friends,” she said.

Her dad never had much interest in renting out the upstairs for fraternal groups so one by one he let the contracts expire, Muriel said.

A passageway once connected his upstairs space with a matching hall in a rear building facing on Brown Street, Muriel said. When Nick Fagiani went out of the hall rental business, he tore the second story passageway down, she said.

To keep out burglars, he then covered over the two upstairs skylights, Muriel said. And that’s the way things sat for more than a half century.

While she much prefers the old Napa to the new, Muriel said she trusts Hasty to take her building into the 21st century. “I think Steve has good taste. He’ll do something good,” she said.

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