High Street Brewery & Café

The same comfortable vibe is still here, along with new features, including artwork that celebrates the people and events that have made High Street so remarkable. As its beloved original manager Jenny Gomez said, it has “unique clientele– from the Dead Heads to the hockey team, the librarians to the tree planters, the lawyers to the students. I couldn’t ask for a better mix of customers.” 
 
This old, bungalow-style house was probably built in 1910, the same year of the German-language newspapers found in its walls during a renovation project. The Yoders, a German-Swiss family, were early residents of the place by the 1910s. Myrna Yoder, one of the McMenamins artists, who has painted some of the panels and the fun, evocative figures and details adorning this pub, has always felt an affinity for the place. Now she’s thinking perhaps there’s a familial connection, too.
 
In the fall of 1988, Jenny Gomez, then manager of McMenamins Lighthouse Brewpub in Lincoln City, transferred to Eugene to become the first manager of the High Street Brewery & Café, the city’s first post-Prohibition brewery. She quickly became the heart and soul of the place. When she’d get off work, Jenny would sit out back and have a glass of wine. And literally every person would talk to her about all that was going on in their lives, and then go grab their table. She was a great listener, gave great advice.
 
Among Jenny’s first customers back in 1988 was an affable soul named Wally. It was a homecoming of sorts. The tall, friendly man had been a regular at the Lighthouse until a new job brought him to Eugene. Coming back to the High Street house was also a homecoming in another sense for Wally. In the mid ‘60s, when the place was still a residence, he had lived upstairs! He said the place was more or less a flop house by that time. Wally took over the north half of the second floor from two friends who had been living there during the previous year. They were “sometime students” who were among the earliest of Eugene’s then small hippie culture– local pioneers with recreational marijuana and LSD experimentation and had direct connections to the best “chemists” down in San Francisco, including Stanley Owsley, the Grateful Dead’s personal acid dispenser. 
 
Of his High Street days, Wally remembered the beauty and completeness of seeing sunrises through the apple tree that still grows out back and sunsets through a cherry tree that stood in the front yard. He also recalls music was a constant part of life there. He and friends listened to lots of folk and jazz records. “Once every hour,” he recalled, “there was a music eruption.”
  
Music and Grateful connections continued at High Street after McMenamins reinterpreted the place as a pub. The vintage Bay-Area concert posters and funky artistic meanderings painted on the walls allude to that, but it goes deeper. Dave Young, who worked at High Street for a number of years, was part of the great Eugene band called the Palace Meat Market. Young and the band opened for the Dead when they played at Eugene (legend has it that Owsley was at the show dressed in a Santa suit giving away some trippy presents). High Street was packed with Dead Heads afterwards… same result during Country Fair each summer.
 
Another local musician who, with his band mates, achieved superstardom, was a High Street pubster. Dan Schmid, bass player for the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, quit the band and worked at High Street for about six years. He rejoined just as the swing thing was starting to generate a lot of interest in the 1990s and helped the Daddies lead the wave. In between tours, when the Daddies returned home to Eugene, Dan stopped in to see friends at High Street.
 
Robert Kyr was a superstar in another musical realm, who frequented High Street. In September 1990, Robert came to University of Oregon School of Music to teach, compose and perform, as well as commune and gather with other musicians, performers, and artists. By 1995, Robert began coming to High Street on a regular basis to copy by hand his new compositions onto music sheets. He’d show up every night at 10pm and stay to closing (1am). He often was the last customer to leave. He called them his “Midnight Shifts.”
 
“Music has one of the most important roles in healing and connections,” says Robert. And he notes that McMenamins High Street is helping this process by “providing a comfortable, perfect setting to gather together and have conversations, enjoy music, generate creative activity, and help bring peace to the world.”
 
One other longtime superstar of High Street is Hanns Anderson. He has been crafting fabulous brews for more than two decades, down in the subterranean basement facility. “I do feel like a prairie dog. There’s that little walk you do, where you go up three of the stairs, and you can just see the patio and the feet of the people on the deck. You kind of stand up straight and look around, just like a little prairie dog, like every brewer’s ever done that’s worked here. And I’ve caught myself doing it too... And then you go back down your little hole.”
 
Cheers!