Aberdeen's Pirate's Cove to be turned into storage

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ABERDEEN (AP) — The Pirate’s Cove, a building with a colorful past, is being gutted and converted into storage.

Kirk Karlen, owner of Kirk’s Auto Repair, bought the building in December and began knocking down interior walls a few weeks ago.

He has also removed a couple of lean-tos and begun painting the exterior. His auto repair shop along North Roosevelt Street is about 100 yards south of the Pirate’s Cove.

The Pirate’s Cove was a stripper bar and was connected to the Body Shop Bar.

The Cove, as it was often referred to, sported a pirate statue standing on a boat connected to the exterior wall. The Body Shop Bar had a 1957 Chevrolet sticking out of the wall. Both establishments closed about three years ago.

“I want the town to look better,” Karlen said. “The building is really run down. It is too old to fix up for a business, so I will just use it for personal storage.”

There is one thing Karlen won’t change: He is leaving the car in the wall.

“It is in there to stay,” he said. “I would have to take down the whole wall to get it out. I’m going to paint it red and get the headlights working, so they can shine at night.”

The pirate is gone. It is now attached to a boathouse on Richmond Lake after a property owner bought it at auction, Karlen said.

Karlen bought the building from Todd Glover, who bought it from the estate of his mother and stepfather, Peggy and Chuck Ackerman.

The building originally housed Ackerman Welding, but was converted in the late 1970s to the Lounge Bar on the east end and an auto repair shop on the west end, Glover said.

“In the mid-80s, Peggy and Chuck went to Las Vegas and came back with the idea to open a restaurant called the Pirate’s Cove,” he said. “They opened up the restaurant on one side and the Body Shop Bar on the other side.”

Sometime in the late 1980s, they converted the restaurant into a bar with exotic dancers.

Glover said part of the reason he and his brothers and sister decided to close the Pirate’s Cove three years ago was that it had a series of owners who had bought it on contract for deed, but defaulted on payments.

Also, the Cove tended to be a place where people got into trouble, he said.

The place was a hangout for construction workers when a pipeline was being built through the area in the early 1980s, and a woman was killed in the parking lot when a car pinned her to a wall, Glover said.

There were a lot of bar fights there, he said.

“When we closed it, the police and sheriff thanked us,” Glover said. “They said that northeast Aberdeen would be safer with the place closed.”

Karlen said he went to the Pirate’s Cove and Body Shop Bar occasionally when it was opened.

“It was kind of cool back in the day,” he said.

There was a clientele that appreciated the Cove, Glover said.

When the going-out-of-business auction took place, items fetched high prices.

There was spirited bidding on the pirate until it sold for $1,500.

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