Or jump atop that chair, made from a tractor seat. Care to take a load off? There’s a bench over there, fashioned from a tailgate. Thompson then put his artistic flair to use in designing many of the surroundings. The added benefit was no costs to heat or cool the place. With no roof or full walls, he couldn’t keep the site open all seasons, so May through September it would be. His idea: From the elevator, build a wide bar with room for plenty of tables and chairs, kind of like a backyard deck on steroids. Thompson’s grand vision of an outdoor bar carried just a modest investment. He bought the elevator and the surrounding 20 acres, at the time a mass thicket of brush near U.S. He saw it not as left for dead but as a potential center post for an elaborate tree house, a dream that eventually started to come to fruition in 2012 when Thompson, now 50, owned an art studio in Princeton. Though trains still rumble by, the elevator shuttered in the 1950s.ĭuring his childhood in nearby Princeton, Thompson marveled at the old elevator, which he calls a silo. After a shootout that left one lawman dead, the thieves were captured.Īt the time, Langley hosted a grain elevator that served a freight line. The community claimed one instance of fame – or, rather, infamy – in 1914 when bandits struck a train in nearby Manlius but were cornered by a 200-man posse at Langley. “A lot of different things happen out here.”Īctually, a lot of nothing happened there for the longest time.įifty-five miles north of Peoria, Langley is an unincorporated blip of a burg that never grew to more than a few houses, generations ago. “There’s always good people, good food, a lot of bikes,” said Leroy Winchel of Hennepin. Newcomers are entranced by its novelty, but repeat guests always find something to hold their interest. Welcome to Psycho Silo, an all-ages experience that is one part gearhead museum, one part adult playhouse, one part concert venue. “We get babies,” said co-owner Troy Thompson. Meantime, in the gravel-and-grass parking areas, you’ll find motorcycles and minivans, moms with strollers and grandmothers with walkers, vehicles and visitors of all sorts. On the walls of the open-air operation, you’ll find hood ornaments, gas caps, license plates, tractor seats, hubcaps, exhaust pipes, headlamps, exhaust pipes and just about any vehicular accoutrement imaginable, a chockablock collection that altogether comes off as an explosion of highway pop art. “A junkyard meets a bar meets an old corn crib.” “I don’t even know how to tell ya,” he is apt to respond. Dave Roggy is never quite sure how to describe his place of business.
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