The Garages

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Garage Café's courtyard in May 2002

The Garages (built in 1924 as The Plaza Garages) is a group of tile-roofed garage stalls arrayed around a courtyard on the 2300 block of 10th Terrace South for the convenience of automobile owners residing at the Highland Plaza. It is now best known as the location of long-time owner Fritz Woehle's antiques showroom and the Garage Café.

The garages were completed in late 1924 to primarily serve tenants at both Highland Plaza and Elm Apartments. With the exception of their wooden doors, the 31 garages were touted as being totally fireproof due to their concrete construction. The partitions between garages featured four-inch concrete walls, six-inch outside concrete walls, and concrete roofs topped with tile. Originally owned by R. D. Johnston, the garages were designed by Martin J. Lide.

Woehle purchased the abandoned complex in the mid 1970s and moved his design office there. With a group of work study students from Red Mountain School he scoured the state for salvaged doors to enclose the other stalls, which he began leasing out to other small businesses. Notable tenants included Charlemagne Records, La Cocina Mexican restaurant, Dick Jemison's art gallery, Cather & Brown Books, and Grayson Dix's Crackerbox Productions. Sculptor Frank Fleming used space there for his studio, and Tom Goad used the Garages to host his "Southside Sundown Cinema" series. Amasa Smith created a full-page advertisement for the Garages that ran in the Birmingham News, but neglected to include a street address, with the result that the site's lone pay-phone rang off the hook for days.

By the late 1970s, most of those businesses had either closed or relocated to Five Points South. Woehle began expanding his own estate and antique sales business into the vacated spaces, gradually focusing on architectural antiques. In 1979 Patrick Cather and Bo Brown, opened their first used and antique book shop, Ex Libris, at the Garages.

In 1981 the Garages was used as a location for a bar scene in "Benny's Place", a TV movie starring Louis Gossett Jr and Cicely Tyson which aired on ABC in 1982. A dozen years later, Jimmy and Kelly Watson leased a connected pair of stalls on one corner for Garage Café and were given permission to use the courtyard for outdoor seating. The bar, which opened in 1994, later expanded to a total of four adjoining stalls.

In 2010 restaurateur Chris Hastings considered building a new restaurant in the adjacent spaces and covering the courtyard, which would have been shared with the bar. He dropped those plans in the face of a popular backlash and unfavorable cost estimates.

In 2014, Fritz Woehle's daughter Kay opened The Garage in the space after Jimmy Watson's death from injuries suffered in a vehicle collision. Fritz Woelhe passed away in 2017 and the property is owned by his family.

References

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