WEST LAFAYETTE – By Thursday morning, a small array of spent beer cans, liquor bottles and a plastic purple mug – branded with the Neon Cactus logo, stuffed with a small floral arrangement and topped with a glossy photo of three friends mugging for a camera one night in the past 28 years – lined the entrance outside the West Lafayette night club.
A few feet away, a sticky note, blown from one of the tributes, was stuck to a spot on the Levee Plaza curb where it appeared someone had poured one out for the Cactus.
Someone had scribbled: “In honor of the memories we had.”
Generations of Purdue grads were reliving memories of their nights at the Cactus and mourning news Wednesday that the cavernous night club – closed all but a few days since March when coronavirus-era restrictions came down in March – wasn’t going to reopen.
The loss of business during the recent months of the coronavirus pandemic proved too much for the club that opened in 1992 in the West Lafayette Levee Plaza, owners Sheila and Jim Cochran announced Wednesday.
Sheila Cochran said state restrictions that limited large gatherings to 250 people, compounded by a Tippecanoe County health order that temporarily barred dance floors and mandated table seating, made running a club with room for 1,290 people looking to mingle “undoable.”
More: 'We all mourn.' Purdue students and alumni react to iconic bar closing.
At the same time, she said, there were expectations from the university for students to play it cool and abide by the social distancing guidelines of what’s called the Protect Purdue Pledge or face possible suspension.
“When the governor says we have 30 more days of where we are, and talking to the health department and not seeing a light at the end of the tunnel for a long period of time, and with the Protect Purdue,” Cochran said, “all of it combined just didn’t allow us to operate where we need to be at full capacity.
More: Neon Cactus, popular Purdue night club, closes as coronavirus restrictions, losses pile up
“Two hundred and fifty in the Cactus isn’t enough to keep it open,” Sheila Cochran said. “We decided it must be providence that now was the time we were supposed to close after 28 years.”
She said they decided to close rather than try to sell the business, where lines out the door on Thursday nights and Breakfast Club mornings on football Saturdays were the rule rather than the exception.
“It's definitely affecting me more than I planned,” said Robert Theodorow, a Purdue grad and owner of SFP, a West Lafayette web development company.
Theodorow said he was a regular on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights when he was in school in the late-‘90s. He and his wife, Summer, met at the Cactus and “had countless date nights there.”
“Summer and I now have two kids, and I just turned 41, so our visits have faded over the years,” Theodorow said. “But we'll always have those memories of our first dates.”
Maggie Wigren, another Purdue grad, said she’d been afraid the Cactus might close, given the pressure to operate under current COVID-19 restrictions – “Which are completely necessary,” she said – and still turn a profit.
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“I’m really devastated at its closure, along with so many other Purdue students and alumni,” Wigren said. “But I'm holding out some hope that it could come back in a year or two, because it's so well loved.”
Bruce Barker played the piano bar in the Rusty Bucket, a room in the Neon Cactus, for 25 years. That gig, Cochran estimated, drew more than 1 million people over that quarter-century. In a farewell posted Wednesday night, Barker put to rest rumors that he was trying to buy the Cactus.
“That’s not even in the realm of possibility,” Barker said.
This spring, when the Neon Cactus and other bars closed as the pandemic crept in, Barker played a series of Thursday night shows streamed live from his basement just outside West Lafayette. More than 14,000 people tuned in for the first Cactus Quarantine show, shouting out song requests and posting 56,000 comments the first night in what turned into an alumni reunion of sorts. More people logged in for follow-up shows.
More: Lafayette mayor joins push to scale back bar restrictions, curfew timed for Purdue reopening
“Boilermakers,” Barker said in his video Wednesday, “we never had a chance to say goodbye. We never got to do it in the Cactus. ... Just hard to believe.”
The Cochrans opened the Neon Cactus in a former Skateaway roller rink as a country-and-western club, hosting space for line dancing and shows by up-and-comers like Joe Diffie and other country acts. They had several other bars in West Lafayette, including Splash in Purdue West, Jake’s Roadhouse in Chauncey Hill Mall and Kazoo’s, which now is Where Else? Bar, also in Chauncey Hill Mall. Macaws on South River Road, replaced by apartments the Cochrans built, closed about the time Neon Cactus opened.
“We never really opened a bar, ever, just to sell drinks,” Sheila Cochran said. “We always wanted our bars to have some facet of entertainment – something that brought them there other than just drinking, that would help them enjoy the whole evening.”
When the line dancing craze waned in the mid-‘90s, the Cochrans retooled the Neon Cactus, keeping the Southwestern name but installing a Top 40 format for its dance floor, catering drink specials and promotions for Purdue students and recruiting Barker for the piano bar.
“It took off,” Sheila Cochran said. “Until March rolled around.”
In early July, Cochrans experimented with reopening for the first time since March under Stage 4.5 of Gov. Eric Holcomb’s statewide reopening plan, which allowed bars and nightclubs to start serving at 50 percent capacity. The club – typically a spot that draws lines outside during busy nights when Purdue is in session, even with a 1,290-person capacity – was retrofitted with sneeze guards at serving stations, door personnel wearing face shields, bars marked with six-foot distancing and tables removed to fit just 250 for the summer crowd.
That test run lasted a week, mainly, Sheila Cochran said, because people didn’t come. Whether it was because campus still was virtually empty – “or maybe people just didn’t really feel safe coming out, yet” – Cochran said she wasn’t sure, preferring to close again until late August when students were scheduled to be back for Purdue’s campus reopening.
The club didn’t follow through with a scheduled Aug. 27 roeopening, timed for the start of Purdue’s fall semester, though, as a county health order continued to restrict bar seating, dance floors and other features in the club.
Less than a week later, the Cochrans pulled the plug.
Jeffrey Barbee has worked promotions, events and social media at the Neon Cactus for the past 18 years, after managing other bars the Cochrans owned. He said closing the doors was sad, though he thought the Neon Cactus had filled its niche as “one of the only venues in this area that was a true entertainment destination.”
“This time has been made a little bit easier to handle with all of the outpouring of messages and posts and calls that Jim and Sheila and I have received,” Barbee said. “Comments about first dates, about bachelorette and bachelor parties, about even weddings at the Cactus. This is why they opened this bar and this is what they brought to this community for almost 35 years in the hospitality industry.”
Sheila Cochran called it a good run.
“It was fun, or we wouldn’t have done it for so long,” Sheila Cochran said. “But I think we’re done. ... We’re going to take a little rest and see what our next chapter is.”
Reach Dave Bangert at 765-420-5258 or at dbangert@jconline.com. Follow on Twitter: @davebangert.
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