PEORIA MAGAZINE July 2022

D ave Roggy is never quite sure how to describe his place of business. “I don’t even know how to tell ya,” he is apt to respond. “A junkyard meets a bar meets an old corn crib.” That, and a whole lot more. On thewalls of the open-air operation, you’ll find hood ornaments, gas caps, license plates, tractor seats, hubcaps, exhaust pipes, headlamps, exhaust pipes and just about any vehicular accoutrement imaginable, a chockablock collection that altogether comes off as an explosion of highway pop art. Meantime, in the gravel-and-grass parking areas, you’ll find motorcycles and minivans, moms with strollers and grandmothers with walkers, vehicles and visitors of all sorts. “We get babies,” said co-owner Troy Thompson. “We get people of all ages.” Welcome to Psycho Silo, an all-ages experience that is one part gearhead museum, one part adult playhouse, one part concert venue. Newcomers are entranced by its novelty, but repeat guests always find something to hold their interest. “There’s always good people, good food, a lot of bikes,” said Leroy Winchel of Hennepin. “They have a lot of car shows. “A lot of different things happen out here.” Actually, a lot of nothing happened there for the longest time. Fifty-five miles north of Peoria, Langley is an unincorporated blip of

D I S H A N D D R I N K

a burg that never grew to more than a few houses, generations ago. The community claimed one instance of fame – or, rather, infamy – in 1914 when bandits struck a train in nearbyManlius but were cornered by a 200-man posse at Langley. After a shootout that left one lawmen dead, the thieveswere captured. At the time, Langley hosted a grain elevator that served a freight line. Though trains still rumble by, the elevator shuttered in the 1950s. During his childhood in nearby Princeton, Thompson marveled at the old elevator, which he calls a silo. He saw it not as left for dead but as a potential center post for an elaborate tree house, a dream that eventually started to come to fruition in 2012 when Thompson, now 50, owned an art studio in Princeton. He bought the elevator and the surrounding 20 acres, at the time a mass thicket of brush near U.S. Route 6 and Illinois Route 40. Thompson’s grand vision of an outdoor bar carried just a modest investment. His idea: From the elevator, build a wide bar with room for plenty of tables and chairs, kind of like a backyard deck on steroids. With no roof or full walls, he couldn’t keep the site open all seasons, soMay through September it would be. The added benefit was no costs to heat or cool the place. Thompson then put his artistic flair to use in designing many of the surroundings. Care to take a load off? There’s a bench over there, fashioned from a tailgate. Or jump atop that chair, made from a tractor seat.

A BAR LIKE NO OTHER

Psycho Silo Saloon borders on indescribable … and irresistible

BY PHIL LUCI ANO PHOTOS BY RON JOHNSON

22 JULY 2022 PEORIA MAGAZINE