This is the bar at the Sandy Chanty, a restaurant at Geneva-on-the-Lake, Ohio. Geneva-on-the-Lake is an old lakefront resort, and the strip is filled with a lot of really old-style amusement businesses. The bar itself is a former shooting gallery built for Coney Island and moved to Geneva-on-the-Lake. The building stands, but the business in it has changed. In high school, I worked at the late, great Idora Park, home of what was once one of the country’s greatest roller coasters. (It burned to the ground in 1984.) At one point, I had been assigned to work at Idora’s shooting gallery, the Cheyenne Shootout, but that used lights rather than .22 ammo. I went to the Sandy Chanty for a drink as part of the Lake Erie Monster bar crawl. (Get a stamp from 10 different Geneva-on-the-Lake establishments, then get a spiffy t-shirt with a sea monster in a floaty drinking a beer.) I kept stumbling on the name: Sandy/Shandy/Shanty/Chanty? And I loved the bar.
