Brooks: On the patio of the Park Tavern, a community gathers to heal

The Park Tavern reopened Wednesday, as if it were any other Wednesday in its long history with St. Louis Park. Even though everything else has changed.

Bouquets lined the length of the patio and the scarred crater where the car slammed into the hill beyond. Photos fluttered in a warm September breeze. Kristina Folkerts and Gabriel Harvey. Smiling with their arms around the people they loved most. Thirty years old forever.

There’s been a Park Tavern, or some version of it, in St. Louis Park for so long, no one is quite certain when the business opened its doors. Sometime around 1906 is the St. Louis Park Historical Society’s best guess. Wednesdays in St. Louis Park wouldn’t feel the same without the Park Tavern and the people on its welcoming patio.

It’s been a Texaco station and candy shop. It’s been a tavern where the games shifted with the generations: Bumper pool, video games, bowling. Owners changed, locations changed, but the Park Tavern stayed the place St. Louis Park came to celebrate the good days. Promotions. High school graduations. A friend moving up in their career.

Until Steven Bailey pulled into the parking lot with four times the legal limit of alcohol in his system — and hit the accelerator. He destroyed two lives and changed countless others. He crushed bones. He ripped families apart.

But this isn’t a story about the man behind the wheel. This is a story about the community behind the Park Tavern.

On Wednesdays, the retired teachers of St. Louis Park meet on the patio. The patio reopened on a Wednesday, so they returned.

Their server that afternoon was a former student. So was the restaurant’s owner, Phil Weber, who paced the line of bouquets and Park Tavern T-shirts his patrons left at the patio, an act of reclaiming it as their own.

“It’s so humbling and so heartwarming and so overwhelming,” said Weber, who said he has been deluged with emails, text and phone calls of support since that awful day. “I’ve been [owner] here 45 years, so I know we’re part of the fabric of the community, but you sort of forget. You’ve been in people’s lives for generations.”

Richfield resident Ron Anderson walked up and pressed $20 into Weber’s hands. A little something for Kristina Folkerts’ three little girls.

This was the place Anderson came to bowl and meet people when he lived in St. Louis Park. This is the place where he met his wife on the bowling alley. The place, he said, “holds so many memories for me.”

“I feel for these nurses too. All these good people,” he added. “What a senseless thing.”

Weber has heard so many stories like that.

“We have so many people meet and then they hold their bridal showers here and then they hold their rehearsal dinners here. Sometimes we even have wedding receptions here.”

During the pandemic, Weber sometimes let families use the patio for celebrations of life, just so they had somewhere to gather and grieve that wasn’t a sterile Zoom call grid.

Around the patio table with the teachers — some had taught Weber, some were his classmates at St. Louis Park High ― almost everyone had a story about something the Park Tavern had given back to the community, from sponsoring any hometown sports team that asked, to hosting a graduation party on this patio for the seniors who missed out on their 2020 commencement.

“All you have to do is mention the ‘PT’ and everyone knows what you mean,” said Darold “Deb” Wold. Now in his 90s, Wold started teaching at Park High in 1959.

They traded stories about the old Park Tavern location on Minnetonka Boulevard and its great pepperjack cheese burgers.

“It’s been such a part of the community for such a long time,” said Bruce McLean, who graduated with Weber and wore his Park Tavern sweatshirt for the occasion. “Anything you ask. If you’re doing a fundraiser, he’ll give you coupons for 30 people bowling. He just never says no.

“That’s why we came back today,” he added. “We wanted to show Phil and the staff here that we appreciate them and we want to support them.”

The smallest gestures — a lunch order, a bouquet, $20 from a stranger — have been a balm for the grieving staff. Kristina Folkerts grew up at the Park Tavern, where her mother, Lauralee, also worked. The nurses from nearby Methodist hospital had come there to toast a colleague who was moving on to the next stage in her career. They were helpers, all.

“The community outreach has been the biggest spirit-lifter,” Weber said. “People know that these kinds of establishments are part of the heritage of a community and have been in people’s lives for years and years.”

Weber turned to stare at the flowers, photographs and written tributes to two lives as brief and beautiful as a Minnesota summer.

“But boy, when you go home tonight,” he said. “Hug your loved ones.”