On the corner is one of the few buildings in Trinidad that was built to be a bar and has always been one, except during Prohibition when it became a confectionery. Built in 1911 and called “The Palace”, it lived up to its name with a very handsome saloon on the first floor and a luxurious restaurant and elegant gambling salon on the second. Where now there is a little aluminum-framed window on the second floor was a handsome curved bay window with stained glass and a gingerbread frame, all of which was removed in the post-World War II frenzy for modernization. However, the original backbar, hand-carved and imported from Germany, is still in place.
Local legend has it that Carry Nation, the hatchet-wielding prohibition activist, once visited this bar but left quietly, as was requested in a very firm manner. This doesn’t quite jive, since Mrs. Nation was in Trinidad in 1906, five years before the building was built (though of course she could have returned). However, her 1906 stay was chronicled in the local newspapers. They reported that when she arrived at the railway station, a porter asked to which hotel her baggage should be delivered. “Some place clean and far from the taint of liquor,” the stalwart (almost 6-foot-tall) woman replied. The porter dropped her bags and said, “Ma’am I think you got off at the wrong station. This is Trinidad!” At the time, there were over 100 bars in the county, some 40 of them along Main and Commercial Streets, where all the hotels were.
If she didn’t visit The Palace, there is no doubt she entered another West Main Street bar owned by a young Italian named Charles Aiello. He ordered her out, she refused, and the upshot was she swore out a warrant for his arrest, charging that “he used unprintable language and struck me in the face.” He swore out a warrant saying she caused a disturbance in his place of business. They each got a $25 fine. She soon left town, after writing that Trinidad was “the devil’s carnival ground…the recruiting place for hell.” Mr. Aiello’s family became prominent businessmen and bankers.