Melinda's Alley debuts beer to raise funds for namesake's headstone

Ever since the red light turned on over the doors of Melinda’s Alley in 2016, the underground speakeasy's proprietors have been telling the story of their muse.

It started with the bar’s name, which was chosen in homage to Malinda Curtis, a Black woman who arrived in Phoenix around the turn of the 20th century.

She was a purported madam, said to be “skilled in the culinary arts” and known for her kindness and hospitality. She lived in a home on the alley shared by the Adams Hotel – Phoenix’s first luxury hotel that stood where the Renaissance Downtown Phoenix Hotel holds court today.

It’s rumored that Curtis’ spirit lingers in the alley and has made visits to the speakeasy. Other easter eggs about the woman are scattered about the underground bar, from her obituary hidden among the Victorian-era decor to a 70-foot mural outside.

Now, Melinda’s Alley is honoring its namesake in a new way. The bar has teamed up with Bone Haus Brewing to create Red Light Melinda, a red ale. The brew will debut this weekend.

The goal of crafting this beer is about more than making another nod to their namesake, says Melinda’s Alley bar manager PJ Baron. Proceeds from the beer will raise money to place a headstone on Curtis’ grave, which has been unmarked at Greenwood Memory Lawn Cemetery for 114 years.

“It’s about shifting the narrative and giving her back her narrative,” Baron says.

Who was Malinda Curtis?

Local "hip" historian Marshall Shore and Dust Cutter bartender Rhonda Benston-Showman are two people who have been instrumental in uncovering and telling Curtis’ story. Benston-Showman has worked at the hotel for 49 years and is known as its unofficial historian.

“We kind of fed one another,” Benston-Showman says of how she and Shore would share information about what they’d learned about Curtis.

Curtis was born in St. Louis in December 1863, according to a database of cemetery records. She arrived in Arizona by way of Tucson and Bisbee. She moved north to Phoenix in the 1890s. She was described as a caring, generous woman who would help others but who also had a taste for gin, a love of four-letter words and a propensity for fighting.

Stories of those altercations, with women and men, made her known among Phoenix police, but “her misdeeds were trivial and plainly traceable to strong drink,” her obituary in the Arizona Republican, now the Arizona Republic, said.

When Curtis died in 1910, at the age of 46, the headline proclaimed, “Good deeds outweigh the sins of Malinda.”

Despite the sentimentality, her obituary was also scathing, calling her old and pathetic, with the mind “of a child in a great many ways. Malinda seemed to have little comprehension of the meaning of evil,” it read.

Nevertheless, the piece lamented the loss of the kindhearted Curtis.

“While she did not always walk the straight and narrow path, she was one of the warmest hearted old women who ever lived and was always doing something for someone whose circumstances were even more destitute than her own,” the obituary read.

Now, more than a century later, those who have told her story are hoping to create a permanent tribute with the headstone.

“It’s only fair that we should do something to honor her,” Benston-Showman says.

How to drink Red Light Melinda

For the collaboration, Baron sought out Fountain Hills' Bone Haus because of the brewery's shared appreciation for Arizona’s past.

“They’re all about telling Arizona history,” he says of Bone Haus, which has built an evolving tale around the legend of the Lost Dutchman. “Even though Melinda’s is a cocktail experience, it’s a cocktail experience that to me is driven through narrative and storytelling, so this really was the right time to bring on a beer.”

Melinda’s Alley has served a handful of beer options before, but this is the first that’s been made for the speakeasy.

The red ale will debut in cans at Melinda’s Alley on Friday and at Dust Cutter, the bar and restaurant at the Renaissance, on Saturday for the downtown Phoenix beer crawl, Urban Ale Trail.

The beer is a sessionable red ale that Bone Haus founder Keith Chapman calls an “old-school craft beer.” Malt-forward, it has a subtle herbal note from crystal hops grown by Billy Goat Hop Farm in Montrose, Colorado.

The approachable, lighter craft beer seemed a “good fit for a speakeasy,” Chapman adds. It is served at the brewery under the name Legend of the Red Ghost. But the cans of beer served downtown will carry Curtis’ name, using the same spelling variation of her first name as the speakeasy. Historic articles have spelled Curtis' first name "Melinda" and "Malinda," which is the name of the speakeasy's mural.

The beer can art shows Curtis, in a red dress with a pink aura vibrating around her, pointing the way to the speakeasy.

“We really wanted to focus on Malinda,” Chapman says, “her welcoming spirit and her generosity.”

Two dollars from each can will go toward the fund for Curtis’ headstone.

Baron says the beer will become a standard offering at the speakeasy, but he aims to raise enough money over the next year to place a headstone on Curtis’ grave by Oct. 28, 2025, the 115th anniversary of her death.

The addition may punctuate the life, and afterlife, of Curtis, who Baron says “reminds us to take care of people.”

Red Light Melinda at Melinda’s Alley

50 E. Adams St.