Shine’s to Celebrate Centennial a Year Late

Megan Casey had started to adorn a wall at Shine's with photos and artifacts from yesteryear in preparation for the West End pub’s centennial celebration last year. Then Hurricane Sandy slammed Long Beach.

Instead of a party, Casey and her husband and owner, Brent Wilson, turned the pub’s pool and darts room into an area to serve free food and drinks and display donated necessities for storm-ravaged neighbors who, in the weeks that followed, were without power or running water.

Follow Long Beach Patch on Facebook.

Last week, Casey finished writing an historical timeline of the 101-year-old pub, located at the northwest corner of California and West Beech streets, as she and Brent get ready to stage the year-delayed celebration Nov. 23. The timeline compliments the photos and artifacts on the wall that went unscathed by Sandy’s floodwaters but otherwise destroyed the basement and various equipment, from refrigeration to tap lines. The timeline speaks of a pub, now the longest running business in Long Beach, that has survived Prohibition, two world wars, a depression and some formidable storms, including the 1938 hurricane and Sandy.

“I spent forever putting this together,” Casey said of the timeline and wall.  

Its items, which run chronologically from left to right, include two vintage photos of Shine’s, taken from a distance near New York Avenue and which Casey dates to 1918 and 1932. The original owner, Eugene Shine, opened the pub in a predominantly blue-collar and Irish-immigrant West End. “According to oral history, he bought a home on California Street, and converted the first floor into a bar in 1912,” reads Casey’s timeline.

The wall also features a newspaper with a headline that declares “U.S. Is Voted Dry,” after the 18th Amendment was ratified Jan. 16, 1919. During Prohibition, Shine relocated the bar to his detached garage that became one of 28 speakeasies in the West End. The wall’s prized photo, one that appeared in a newspaper in 1930, shows a raid of Shine’s in which police confiscated $20,000 worth of liquor, an amount that leads the Casey and Wilson to believe Shine was also a bootlegger.

“It’s unknown whether or not Eugene Shine was able to re-establish operations after the raid — there is no evidence that he was arrested or convicted,” the timeline reads. “All we know for sure is that in 1933, when Prohibition was finally repealed, Shine’s was ready for business.”

In 1946, a Shine’s employee, Mike Delury, bought the bar for $12,000, according to information Casey was able to pieced together, which includes a property card that she posted on the wall. She learned that to make the purchase Delury needed a loan, which he obtained through the St. Ignatius Church on West Broadway, and that the money was laundered through Whitbread Lumber on Magnolia Boulevard and loaned with two stipulations: the business must be closed on Good Friday, and no woman may be allowed behind the bar.  

In the days immediately after Sandy, though, Casey claimed the distinction of first female bartender at Shine’s. “Since these were extenuating circumstances,” she wrote in the timeline, “we think the church will forgive us this lapse.”

For her research, Casey tapped the archives at the Long Beach Historical Society, spoke with its officers, and talked with former pub employees and longtime patrons, including Jimmy May, who knew Shine and still stops in occasionally for a drink.

Casey also posted a photo of May with New York Rangers hockey players, some of who lived in the dwelling above the bar during the 1960s and ’70s, when the team practiced at Long Beach Ice Arena. Casey and Brent Wilson have resided upstairs since 2006, a year after Wilson and a partner bought the pub from Delury’s children, after their father died in 1988. Once the wall is completed, it will bear images from every decade, including some that were taken after Sandy. What Casey’s research still couldn’t settle is when Shine’s building was originally constructed and what it was used for prior to the pub.

Wilson said that every time something needs to be replaced, modified or modernized at Shine’s, he finds a new artifact from decades past. He once found a rotary-phone order sheet, now browning with age, inside an electrical panel. And when after Sandy he knocked down a storage room, he stumbled upon steps that were likely built during Prohibition to help discreetly transport liquor into the bar from a neighboring street.

“It’s like peeling back layers of history,” Wilson said. “It’s fun owning this place, but it takes a lot of work to keep a building of its age standing.”

Thanks to the contributions of local volunteers after last year’s storm, though, Wilson and Casey were able to rebuild and can throw their party a year later.

The couple is unsure just how many people may attended Saturday’s celebration — which starts at 5 p.m. and comes with a $40 entry fee that includes hot food, a DJ and 100th anniversary souvenir pint glass — since many West End residents remain displaced. But there’s no doubt where the couple stands, as indicated by something they wrote in an invitation: “Last year, Sandy took away our 100th anniversary. This year, we’re taking it back.”