Shakespeare’s, Ninth and Elm

Stephen Bybee
Columbia, MO
December, 1998

The wonderful thing about posting a photograph of a Columbia institution like Shakespeare’s is that I don’t feel the necessity of supplying an overwhelming amount of descriptive text. Everyone has their own memories of Shakespeare’s; everyone has Shakespeare’s stories and glowing recollections of past and current Shakespeare’s outings. This photograph was taken in November or December 1998 from the second level of a bar across the intersection of Ninth and Elm. It must have been 9:30 or 10 p.m. on a less than busy weeknight, with Shakespeare’s closed for the evening, and just a few loyal employees scraping dough off of countertops, taking out the trash, and wiping down the bar before turning off the lights. Shakespeare’s was a difficult structure to photograph from the street, and only the elevation gained across the street allowed a photograph to be taken with the appropriate perspective. In the late 1990s, Shakespeare for me was less about the pizza, and more about the commingling of my friends in the art department with my friends in the journalism school, generally over pitchers of beer and at various levels of conversational intensity. In May 2015 I took a series of photos of the exterior of the original Shakespeare’s building before demolition and redevelopment of this corner of Ninth and Elm. With a large enough venue, these photos could be stitched together to completely recreate the exterior of Columbia’s Shakespeare’s in 2015 in one continuous image.