It was just a split-second thing. I was driving west on Gull Road towards downtown Kalamazoo, and it caught my eye just as I had passed it. There is construction work happening on the building that for a couple of generations was the Gull Road Tavern, across from another northeast side staple, Frosty Boy.

The Gull Road Tavern, or GRT, or more bluntly, the "Grrrt" was an "after a long hard shift" watering hole for denizens of that part of Kalamazoo and Comstock Township. This is what it looked like a year before it closed.

Gull Road Tavern in 2012. (Google Street View)
Gull Road Tavern in 2012. (Google Street View)
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According to Vanished Kalamazoo contributors, back in the 1940s, it was owned by a man named Albert Davies, who also owned a pub at the corner of Gull Road and G Avenue named the Fairway Tavern.

Another Vanished Kalamazoo commenter remembered the food and the fun. Posted Michael Niedzielski in 2016, "Stacked ham sandwiches with the ham sliced so thin you could read the Kalamazoo Gazette through it, and the old couple that played music there on Saturday nights, her on piano, and him playing a snare drum w/cymbal (or was it the other way around)?

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Anecdotally, sources say the building was either sold or leased after it closed in July of 2013. Work started on the eastern wall, but then stopped, with exposed insulation, and it has been that way for more than a few years.

With the explosion of cannabis stores, that sounds like a reasonable guess, but the information is hard to come by. Is there a liquor license still available? If there is, it could reopen at a pub, but looking at similar businesses, it's hard to see that happening. But maybe we'll get some clarification sometime in 2022.

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