For a fairly simple frame building, this tavern has a long history of civic hand-wringing, having been alternately threatened with demolition or deemed worthy of renovation at every major anniversary of its construction. In the early twenty-first century, the building was sold to a private owner, who plans to restore it. This is a building worth fighting for, if for no other reason than it reminds its closest neighbor, the massive Hamot Hospital, that buildings of human scale and simple honesty can coexist among the large slabs of brick and glass that block its view of the lake. Considered in its 1815 context, the tavern is quite large. Its narrow clapboard skin and double-sash eight-over-eight windows are normally found on small Federal and Greek Revival buildings, but, here, a full three stories of them are set directly along the sidewalk. In 1841, the gable-roofed building was converted to a private home and had a two-story intersecting gable extension added to the south.