Post #323096 by Sweet Daddy Tiki on Fri, Aug 3, 2007 4:24 PM

Gary & I spent the last Friday night of our "Lost in Paradise 2007 Vacation Tour" at the Sip-N-Dip Lounge. An account of our evening is in this post. I thought I'd post more pics and info here.

The bar is the first thing you see when you enter. The backlit yellow undersea mural, red bottomlit bar glasses and blue glow from the two windows into the swimming pool create a dreamy, evocative mood.

Booths on two levels. At the lower right you can see the corner of the piano/organ bar where Pat Spoonheim (Piano Pat) performs 5 nights a week.

Corner booth with black velvet painting.

The ceiling matting has a dark, rich patina from 45 years of use (and stale cigarette smoke). The outrigger is a small plastic lamp.

The Formica tabletops are in awfully good shape for a bar that still allows smoking, so I don't know if they've been replaced over the years, but the same pattern can be seen in photos from the 60's.

Fishbowl, for two or more.

Ad.

Beautifully garnished drink. I think this one was a Grass Skirt (made with sour apple - a strange flavour for a tropical drink).

Piano Pat has been playing piano and organ at the Sip-N-Dip since 1962. There's a good article about her here.

The swimming pool with its mosaic tile Hawaiian scene is almost unchanged in over 40 years (see photos below).

Windows into the lounge are visible below the water line. In 2004 a crack developed in one of the glass walls and it had to be replaced. Luckily the glass did not break before pool was drained, or the bar would have been flooded. Story here.

The pool building from the outside.

These illuminated signs used to be on the front of the motel (see below).

Our drink server (a dental hygenist student who loved the S-n-D from the moment she first set eyes on it) gave us a reprint of an article about the O'Haire that appeared in Tourist Court Journal in Feb. 1966. It's mostly about the hotel, which had a lot of swanky modern innovations for its day...

...including a helicopter landing pad.

The first year the Sip-n-Dip was open it wasn't Tiki, but had some nautical/maritime elements that survived the transformation, as seen in this picture...

namely, the mural behind the bar, the windows into the pool, and the seahorse pattern tabletops.

I'll reproduce the text of the article in a separate post.