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Quirky tale #7:
Fishing for a streetside dinner
Infamous Gutter Creek, running down First Avenue before the Denny Regrade reshaped much of the city’s topography, was notoriously muddy. Returning salmon could even be caught in its shallow freshets at certain times of year. In our “Then” photo, snapped between 1903 and 1906, an enterprising young fisher trolls for his dinner. A small crowd observes from the sidewalk in front of the Virginia Bar, erected in 1903 at the southwest corner of First and Virginia.
Maybe we hooked you with this April Fools fish tale. Salmon never have run along the gutters of First Avenue. The slightly renamed Virginia Inn, a popular “art bar,” opened in 1981. Today’s owner Karl Sexton purchased the venue from original proprietors Patrice Demombynes and Jim Fotherlingham in 2019. “We had a year to figure out where the dishes were before the pandemic shut us down,” Sexton says. The treasured corner venue survived by the skin of its teeth and, no foolin’, envisions a mud-free future.