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The bathroom at St. Johns beer bar and community hub Lombard House is not where anyone looks for it. Which is to say, it’s not inside. The bar’s century-old building was once a construction office and then a bait shop, owner Brian Koch says. And its bathroom is still outside and around the corner. He figured he might as well make the toilet fun once you found it. “I think they’re expecting a disaster,” he says. “And so when they get in there and it’s just like the dumbest bathroom you’ve ever seen, it’s disarming.” First, he said, it was just some potty jokes. Then came Ronald Reagan. “We had a signed picture from Reagan,” Koch remembers, “and it said, ‘Thanks to you, this movement is possible.’ I added another sentence to it: You know, ‘Dear Lombard House.’” Reagan’s no longer there, after a customer angrily came back from the pisser believing the bar was an arch-Republican hotbed. But a theme was born. The bathroom is now tiled with framed pictures of celebrities on toilets—Elvis, Frank Zappa, and The Dude—each one inscribed by Koch with an endorsement to Lombard House. Except, that is, for Naomi Campbell, who thinks the place is a dump. “I just figured she would hate our bar,” Koch says. “We’re not quite up to her standards.”
7337 N Lombard St.
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