The Bar Association: a Great Bar; a Mysterious Death

Back in 2020, when the city of Springfield announced the upcoming transformation of the former downtown Court Square Hotel block—vacant for more than 30 years—into apartments and some retail space, I couldn’t help but harken back to the place being the site of Springfield’s most popular nightspot of the mid-to late-1980s: the ingeniously named Bar Association. 

In 1983, restauranteur Tony Ravosa Sr. owned the entire building—among several buildings downtown—and his family lived upstairs in a truly classic urban chic abode, topped off with rooftop a garden with an incredible view:

The Bar Association was simply THE PLACE TO BE. Unlike before, where Springfield’s downtown bar scene was a smattering of crappy little joints—each with its own clique (in my opinion)—the Bar Association welcomed all comers as long as they behaved. As a guy, you pretty much had to “dress to impress”—and this meant collared shirts—but it was a welcome addition to Springfield’s nightlife. The Irish and Italian tough guys pretty much got along there because there was kind of a unsaid truce at the Bar Association: DON’T START YOUR SHIT HERE. Ravosa’s son, Anthony Jr., hired a lot of his friends as bartenders and bouncers. So everybody knew everybody at the BA. The vibe was great.

I remember one room having actual jury boxes as seats from an old courthouse. How cool is that? Because the place was an old building, it could get a bit claustrophobic at times. I often thought it was a fire hazard, but then, after three or four beers, I kind of said to myself, “FOGETTABOUTIT!” In the basement part of the bar, lines of patrons would snake their way around the place—one walking one way, one going the opposite way—so it was a classic meet (meat?) market parade. In such close quarters, you got to see everyone up close for a few fleeting seconds.

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In 1985, there were headlines over the bizarre death of a mysterious woman at the Bar Association. Anthony Ravosa Sr. found 29-year-old Donna Koletsos of Chicopee dead of a broken neck at 7:55 a.m. November 16, 1985 at the bottom of a cement stairway in the basement Jury Pool part of the bar. 

Immediately there was talk. “She was murdered,” said one of my co-workers at State Line Potato Chips in Springfield a day or two afterward.

“Yeah?” I asked. “What do YOU know?”

“I can’t say any more,” she replied.

This kind of conversation was repeated all over the Springfield area in the coming weeks: people who pretended to be “in the know,” but they knew nothing—except that it was fishy.

An inquest report of the death said Koletsos was a “particularly heavy user” of cocaine, and that she had a potentially lethal level of coke in her system when she died. The report revealed that Koletsos, the manager of Don’s Den, a bar and café in Willamansett, had expressed apprehension about going to the Bar Association that night, and had told several people that she feared “her legs were going to be broken.”

The secret judicial probe interviewed more than 40 witnesses on the stand, including police, friends of the woman, and Ravosa Sr. The report detailed Koletsos having made several requests for loans—totaling as much as $12,000—from many individuals in her final days. 

The Bar Association’s manager testified that he had closed the Jury Pool area at about 11:45 p.m. on November 15 because there had been no bar patrons. The entire Bar Association was shut down at about 2:30 a.m., the same exact time a newspaper carrier reported seeing Koletsos driving south on Riverdale Street in West Springfield—toward Springfield—according to the findings of Judge Salvatore Polito.

Police, after an autopsy, had originally concluded that the death was accidental. Besides a fractured cervical vertebra, she also had a broken nose. Polito reported that there was no evidence to conclude whether she fell, was pushed, or was tossed down the stairs. He was also unable to determine “if any unlawful act or negligence contributed toward the death.”

Polito also said that “no one associated with the Bar Association saw (Koletsos) that night.”

The rumors of a murder weren’t too fanciful at the time, considering that a woman heavily into coke and likely heavily in debt, who feared going to the “BA”—as the bar was nicknamed—said her legs were going to be broken, ended up dying unnoticed and was dead there all night. If she had been seen heading toward Springfield on Riverdale at 2:30, how did she get in the bar so late? Why had no employees seen her?

Polito wrote in his report that evidence showed the latch to a door leading to the stairway had been unfastened. The security employee at the BA had stated he did not check the latch to the door before he left that night.

Koletsos’ sister, Debra J. Ellis, sued the BA for $1 million, seeking damages on a claim of wrongful death and to cover her funeral expenses. There were no newspaper reports of the result of the lawsuit.

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I recently took some photos of the old Court Square Hotel building, which was simply beautiful when the late afternoon sun was hitting it:

It’s difficult to believe the whole block had been abandoned for so long, and that we had to wait all these years for the rehab project to be put together. It took the construction of the casino to finally make it happen: you simply couldn’t have a vacant, deteriorating building across the street from the casino. It would be simply bad for business.

WinnCompanies of Boston and co-developer Opal Real Estate—Peter Picknelly’s company—had been cleaning up hazardous materials there before rebuilding could even get off the ground. Peter’s father actually got the ball rolling more than 25 years ago, but the plans were stalled several times, and the prep work has been extensive. There are 14 separate companies, entities, and government agencies involved in a complicated project, but the effort is definitely worth it. After all, how can you have such a huge building rotting away right next to downtown’s urban park, across the way from the center of the city’s government and courts, and across the street from the MassMutual Center and the casino?

MassMutual kicked in $5 million into the project, which is also getting $14.5 million from MassHousing, $16 million from MGM, and $11.3 million in state and federal historic tax credits.

Last month because of cost overruns related to the pandemic, WinnCompanies threatened to pull the plug on the project unless there was another $13.5 million infusion. The state Department of Housing put up half of it-—$6.5 million—and the city of Springfield begrudgingly covered the other $6.5 million after a last-minute City Council vote on March 25, which was WinnCompanies ultimate deadline. 

There will be a restaurant, but unfortunately, there will be no Bar Association there. It was a one-of-a-kind bar the likes of which we’ll never see again.

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A few years ago the Springfield Republican took some photos of the interior of the building, including the one just below of the ruins of the Bar Association. No, the spiral staircase wasn't where Koletsos was found. She met her maker at the bottom of another set of stairs.

Ravosa Sr. was an attorney, but his law practice took a back seat to his other endeavors, including owning restaurants and real estate. My father knew him, and I met him once at his Riverboat restaurant in South Hadley:

A flamboyant character who was chairman of the Springfield Civic Center Commission, he once came to Cathedral High School when I attended to talk during an assembly about his vision for the Springfield Civic Center, which included hosting bullfights. My friends and I looked at each other in amazement and amusement about that idea.

He openly feuded with the Springfield Newspapers and the Springfield Redevelopment Authority, the latter of which accused him and his son of illegally purchasing alcohol from package stores instead of wholesalers for the Bar Association. The bar was also singled out for a violation in which women bared her breasts during a wet T-shirt contest. The Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission went after him about the noise level at outdoor concerts at the BA.

Ravosa’s dream was to develop riverfront condos in Springfield—something the Springfield political establishment never let him do.

In 1991, Ravosa faced foreclosure proceedings against several of his downtown office buildings, including the BA building, and he filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection—I believe that was right around the time the Bar Association closed for good. Or did it close before then? My memory fades.

What I do remember distinctly was Ravosa shooting himself in the leg with his own unlicensed .22 caliber derringer in 1980. He claimed he was transferring the gun from one office to another when it went off—I believe at one point he said it fell out of a drawer from a desk he was moving and it shot him.

At the time the TV show Dallas was at the height of its popularity, and the big mystery in popular culture was a murder attempt on Dallas villain J.R. Ewing. “Who shot J.R.?” was the catchphrase across the country, and so, locally, the oft-repeated joke was, “Who shot A.R.?”—because a lot of people believed someone tried to take out Anthony Ravosa, and he wasn’t talking.

Local blogger Tommy Devine is still convinced it was an “assassination attempt.” I’m sure people had this shooting in mind when Donna Koletsos was found dead in the BA—that there had to be questionable people in Ravosa’s background, so something nefarious HAD to have happened in both incidents, and there were surely coverups in both cases…that someone snapped the woman’s neck and placed her at the bottom of the stairs.

I stole Tommy Devine's photo of the Ravosa painting on the building from his blog post about A.R.

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When WinnCompanies threatened to pull out of the project, it was beginning to look like this building was truly cursed. It certainly was for Donna Koletsos, who ended up dead there and NOBODY SAW NUTTIN’.