The Union Club tavern in 1961, located in what is now commonly referred to as the RoeMarks building on Main Street in Hermiston.

Echoes of the past on Hermiston’s Main Street are helping inform its future.

A project is underway to restore the old Union Club bar to its former glory, re-imagined for a new generation as a coffee shop by day, bar by night.

The two story red brick building — located on the corner of Main Street and Northeast Second — is more familiar to many as “the old RoeMark’s building,” but before it was a western wear store it was a hangout known as the Union Club from the 1940s to the 1960s.

Justin Doyle, one of the partners in the project, said they want it to become a “second living room” for Hermiston, where people can go to spend time together over coffee, wine or craft beers.

“We want to connect more with the heartbeat of Hermiston,” he said.

After ending their run as RoeMark’s Men’s and Western Wear from 1974 to 2012, the building and its counterpart next door were purchased by Simmons Insurance in 2016. The building next door was turned into office space for the company, but Simmons Insurance has been looking for the past year for someone to lease the corner space for a project to help revitalize downtown.

The Union Club will be completed sometime this year, but Doyle said a timeline hasn’t been nailed down yet. He sees opportunity in working on the remodel at the same time as the city of Hermiston works to turn Second Street into a festival street; plans for the remodel include installing a sliding door on the Second Street side that would lead to patio seating with a view of events taking place there. Inside, they plan to feature a fireplace surrounded by couches.

“We’re focusing on the quality of beverages and the sense of community,” he said.

He said the Union Club will feature a very “intentional” selection of coffees, craft beers, wines and other beverages served in a cozy, welcoming place that will encourage people to spend more time downtown. The upstairs will be turned into meeting spaces where groups will be able to hold gatherings and the Union Club will host classes on things like exploring Scotch or specialty beers.

Joshua Woods, another partner in the project, is working to gather photos of what the old Union Club looked like, as well as memorabilia from the building such as the old Coca Cola sign they hung up after finding it in a crawl space.

“We’re trying to bring back as much of the original building as we can,” he said.

He, Doyle and others working on the project hosted a luncheon in the Union Club building last week to try and tease out some memories from former patrons of the original Union Club.

Those memories might be taken with a grain of salt.

“In the men’s bathroom there was a sign in there that said ‘Please flush the toilet, Umatilla needs the water,’” Bill Meyers said as he ribbed Sam Nobles about growing up in Umatilla.

“Now that’s fake, B.S. news!” Nobles said.

“It was in there for a while,” Meyers insisted.

That particular debate was never settled, but Nobles did say despite being from Umatilla he has fond memories of time spent in the Union Club.

“They had a poker room and it was downstairs,” he said. “I could go down and play poker when I was 18 even though I couldn’t drink.”

The Union Club started in the 1940s as hundreds of men from various trade unions flooded the area to work first on the igloos at the Umatilla Chemical Depot and then on the McNary Dam. Its exact closing date was unknown by the group but they guessed it was in the mid-1960s.

Meyers said during that time period Umatilla boys like Nobles used to come into town and “try to steal our girlfriends” before being chased back home. The running rivalry between the two towns, which has since faded somewhat as Hermiston has grown, was the subject of some discussion on Wednesday. Meyers remembers an old chamber pot — known by its slang term “white owl” — that a schoolmate found and tied to the back of his truck. Umatilla students stole it (Nobles claims to have had no part in the heist, although he knows who did), and for a while stealing the chamber pot from the other town was a frequent target of weekend teenage hijinks.

When asked if he had ever gotten kicked out of the Union Club, Meyers said he might have a time or two.

“Sammy knows, we’d get in here and everyone would get louder and louder,” he said. “Every beer you’d drink, you’d get louder, and they’d say you either quiet down or get out.”