Could this 100-year-old house be your next favorite bar hangout in downtown Fresno?
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From the street, the Elia Home is a sole survivor, a visual reminder of a neighborhood that used to exist on Van Ness Avenue between Highway 41 and downtown Fresno.
"The only house that's remaining on this block is right here," says owner Phillip Kliewer, standing under the shade of a large tree out back. "All of this was residential neighborhoods."
Now the white, two-story house sits between empty dirt lots, next to a gas station and across the street from an auto detail shop. Behind the home, you can see the DoubleTree Hotel and the Fresno Convention Center.
The Brewery District is off in the other direction; close, if not quite within line of sight.
Kliewer and several longtime friends bought the house in 2017 and set forth on a rehab project to turn the home into a neighborhood bar called Moses McQueen's.
It's what those in the revitalization scene call "adaptive reuse."
Says Kliewer: "Most people would say, 'demo it.' We look at the value of preserving something and making it cool."
Who is Moses McQueen?
In 2019, Kliewer and his team took second place in the Downtown Fresno Partnership's Create Here competition, pitching a casual-and-cozy, rum-and-coke kind of neighborhood bar that would pull together the historical nature of the building and Fresno lore.
"The whole project is kind of a love letter to Fresno," Kliewer says.
Moses McQueen is an amalgamation of the names Moses J. Church and Anthony "McQueen" Easterby.
The two were prominent Fresnans, for those who know the history . Church is considered the father of Fresno irrigation and actually worked for Easterby, who owned the farmland next to which the Central Pacific Railroad decided to build the station that would become the heart of the city.
Elia Home at 634 Van Ness Avenue
The space itself is a two-story duplex named for Samuel and Ruth Elia, who had the house built in 1915 in what was then the Armenian Town neighborhood. They lived on the bottom floor and their children upstairs. A one-story commercial building was added to the property in 1935 and became the headquarters for the family's painting business: Sam Elia & Son.
The addition, known as a commercial bump-out, was at one time a trend for residential properties that sat on major thoroughfares or next to streetcar lines. "This is a rare surviving example of live/work residential construction in the downtown area from the early 20th century," reads the home's listing on the local register of historic places .
When Samuel Elia retired in 1951, Aram's Watch & Clock Shop took over the space. Elias' daughter Ann lived in the house until her death in 2001.
The house wasn't in great shape when Kliewer took over.
The old brick foundation was crumbling, and had to be removed and replaced in order for the building to meet the load requirements needed to transition it from a residential into a commercial space.
There was some speculation that the house was being moved, because until last week, the house had been hoisted five feet in the air so the new foundation could be installed.
Last week, a crew of workers in white protective gear were finally inside the house, pulling plaster from the walls to clear out any remnants of lead paint. Now, work on the interior will begin in earnest, Kliewer says.
The bottom floor of the house will become a 1,200-square-foot main bar that opens up on to a back yard deck and patio space with newly constructed bathrooms. The commercial building up front will eventually become prep space for the bar's kitchen, though it will likely rely on food trucks when it first opens, Kliewer says.
The back yard will be the main selling point of Moses McQueen's.
"We really fell in love with the back yard."
In fact, it was a back yard ArtHop party in 2019 that convinced Kliewer and his partners that the idea of putting a bar in a 100-plus-year-old house could work. It wasn't anything fancy. They brought in some makeshift picnic tables and an old couch, and strung lights in the trees.
"It was one night and we had 300 people out here," he says.
"People loved it."
Not that the project hasn't had its challenges.
It took more than two years to get financing, which fell through twice at two different credit unions. There were delays because of the pandemic, not to mention a 50% increase in construction costs. But now that the foundation is done and the work can move indoors, "it's going to go fast," Kliewer says, even if people won't be able to see the results from the street.
Moses McQueen's is expected to open in the middle of next year.
In the mean time, the team is documenting the project on social media and will be starting a crowdfunding campaign in the next few weeks to help pay for things outside the financing plan; things like shade sails in the backyard and a letter box sign out front. There will be swag.
"I'll be excited when it's done," Kliewer says.
"I'll be excited when I see people out here."
