LA POINTE, Wis. — Yes, there's a Tom. Yes, his place burned down. And yes, it's a cafe. Technically.
"We're a fully licensed restaurant that will sell you a bag of peanuts," said Tom Nelson, sitting in the smoking section of Tom's Burned Down Cafe. The smoking section is a little loosely defined because the entire seasonal establishment is outdoors. The bar, to reiterate, burned down.
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"On May 19 of 1992, just before Memorial Day," explained Nelson, "we were totally destroyed by fire, caused by arson, without benefit of insurance."
In Nelson's account, "a disgruntled employee" was responsible for the blaze.
"Boy, was the town p---ed that we weren't completely destroyed," he said.
Tom's Burned Down Cafe stands today — if "stands" is in fact the correct word — as a post-apocalyptic Margaritaville on Madeline Island, the largest of Lake Superior's Apostle Islands.
"It is iconic," said Glenn Carlson, chair of the La Pointe Town Board. "Some people, I will admit, mistake it for a junkyard, but it is far more than that. I have heard other people describe it as a work of art, and there's no one that has gotten in there that is not amused by the sayings on the walls."
Those gags and aphorisms, painted on boards that are nailed to just about every vertical surface in the cafe, might be considered "dad jokes" — if your dad was the kind of guy who would keep his bar open even after it burned down.
"I used to have a handle on life, but it broke," reads one sign.
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"There's a lot of room at the top," reads another. "It's the bottom where things are crowded."
A third sign declares that "No serious tourist should be able to sleep at night until they've drunk in the beauty of" — the word "Leona's" is crossed out — "Tom's Burned Down Cafe."
"Leona's" was the original name of the bar before it burned down. As described by authors Jim Draeger and Mark Speltz in "Bottoms Up," a book about Wisconsin's distinctive bars and breweries, Leona Erickson was "an independent-thinking woman" who opened a beer bar and dance hall in the Madeline Island woods in 1951.
After Erickson retired in the 1980s, the bar was slated for demolition. Instead, Nelson and his business partners moved it into town and reopened Leona's in 1990. "I was the low bid on demolishing everything," said Nelson, "with no intention of demolishing it."
As Nelson sat at the bar this summer, smoking cigarettes and drinking Bailey's spiked with Bushmills whiskey, he told tales of a four-decade dance with the various authorities claiming jurisdiction over aspects of his operation.
One of his stories involved an inspector who told Nelson it was against the law to have a shower stall at a restaurant.
"I'd already learned to obey only good laws," said Nelson, who prides himself on offering a public shower. "For 10 cents' worth of fingernail polish, I painted 'emergency eye wash station' on the wall."
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There was an account of his relationship with the Madeline Island Chamber of Commerce.
"I've only been thrown out three times," said Nelson proudly. "I can rejoin tomorrow. ... I think." (The Chamber of Commerce did not respond to an interview request for this article.)
"The town gave us so much s--t about every single thing," Nelson said about building his Burned Down Cafe from the ashes of Leona's.
"It's not as bad anymore," he said regarding his relationship with the town today.
By the time Carlson first visited the island in 2003, the bar was firmly established in more or less its current form.
"Tom's Burned Down Cafe was one of the first places I found and enjoyed," Carlson said, "spending a few nights there listening to the music and enjoying the ambiance. Exploring what the foundation of that building really is and seeing that old vehicle underneath that everything seems to be resting on."
That's a 1976 Cadillac. The car's roof is just barely visible underneath the decking. A palm-frond umbrella represents the only surviving element of the original bar.
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"It was upwind," explained Nelson, who mounted the umbrella on top of the car. After the fire, "basically, we were running the bar out of that Cadillac in the front yard." Friends "who were mainly the artists around the area" pitched in to add infrastructure.
According to "Bottoms Up," Tom's Burned Down Cafe has materials including a tent from Big Top Chautauqua; chairs pulled out of the island dump; and marble bathroom partitions from Bayfield's Pureair Sanatorium "reclaimed to serve as a fancy bar top."
A semitrailer serves as the bar's largest enclosed structure. "It starts at the cash register in the bar," said Nelson, pointing along the trailer's length. "Behind that's the kitchen, then there's 8 feet of women's room and 8 feet of men's room. It adds up to 40 feet long." When you lift the trailer door, "then the bar is open."
A band that was booked to play Leona's called Nelson after the fire. "Tom, I heard the place burned down," Nelson remembers a band member saying. "Does that mean the gig's canceled?" It did not.
Tom's Burned Down Cafe is still a music venue, with well-amplified bands providing by far the island's most conspicuous after-dark entertainment.
"There's a lot of really good live music there," said Riley Brown, co-owner of Hot Island Sauna. "The laid-back vibe of the whole thing and the funny sayings all over the wall, it feels like you're in a tree house or something."
Customers pay in cash.
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"We have always taken every kind of credit card," said Nelson. "We just don't give them back."
As for personal checks, "People used to put up 'local checks only' (signs). We had one that said 'no local checks,' because it was always our friends who bounced the checks."
Brown calls Tom's "our local clubhouse, for people living on the island. It's a place to go for happy hour after work and be outside and enjoying the sunshine."
You'll find the townies clustered near the front of the place while tourists more often press back toward the stage. "But we mix," added Brown. "Everybody has friends coming up, and a lot of us were tourists who moved."
Though the Burned Down Cafe is now a well-known attraction, it still stands out as unusual on Madeline Island, which boasts a yacht club and a golf course and has traditionally favored a preppy New England aesthetic over the equatorial abandon of Tom's. Some of the island's other hangouts have quaint names like The Pub, The Beach Club and Grampa Tony's.
"Some people want to buy vanilla, and other people want to buy chocolate," said Nelson. In his analogy, a "vanilla" stay on the 14-mile island might involve renting one of the many vacation houses along the shore. You could sit on the beach, look up at the stars, sip an herbal tea. On the other hand, you could rent a place in town "close enough to stumble home" and party at Tom's.
Nelson tells the story of a ferry boat captain who came to him and said, "For nearly 30 years I've been taking people back to Bayfield, (hearing them complain) 'What the hell did you bring us over there for? There's nothing to do.'" According to that captain, said Nelson, "We single-handedly changed that."
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The Burned Down Cafe's iconoclastic identity might lead one to believe that Nelson came to the island to shake things up, but in fact, he was raised on Madeline, part of a well-established local family.
"The Nelson family goes back to the late 1800s when their ancestors married into the Russell family," explained Carlson. "They had a large number of children, who had a large number of children. At one point, the Nelson family was probably a quarter of the island population."
You can't spend much time on Madeline without, one way or another, doing business with a Nelson. "The descendants have succeeded in a number of different enterprises on the island," Carlson said. "One of Tommy's brothers runs the major construction company that builds roads and driveways on the island."
Tension within the family came into the public eye in 2016 when Nelson was paid $300,000 by the town of La Pointe after filing a lawsuit alleging local police had used unnecessary force during an arrest following a minor traffic collision. The lawsuit said that Tom Nelson and his cousin, Greg Nelson, chair of the town board at the time of the 2014 arrest, had been "directly involved in an ongoing Nelson family feud for many years, and they have disliked and distrusted each other for nearly 20 years."
Before becoming the owner of a Burned Down Cafe, Nelson said, his occupations included sailboat racing and land investment. "Tom is a unique individual, probably a genius," said Carlson, "and a terrific marketer and has found his niche in that aspect of island life."
Tom's Burned Down Cafe "is a fountain of laughter, and we don't care if you're laughing with us or at us," said Nelson. "You've got to be tough if you're going to be stupid."
As Nelson sat at the closed bar over the lunch hour, an eager crowd started to gather outside. As soon as the gate opened and the music started to blast, people poured in. Adults bellied up for drinks while kids ran around exploring the sprawling establishment's nooks and crannies.
As for Tom himself, he just blended right into the crowd: still smoking, still drinking, still Burned Down and still open for business.
The Trust Project
