Bricktown Bar Owner Gets Permission To Paint Over Wells Fargo Logo

A metro business was slammed with a lawsuit by Wells Fargo after the bank said the Bricktown bar was using their name without permission. However, the owner of that bar wanted to remove the name from the building long ago but said he wasn't allowed to paint over it.

The sign in question was a Wells Fargo logo, but it was finally painted over Monday afternoon. Now the owner of Whiskey Chick's bar said he hopes the bank will drop the lawsuit.

It didn't take long to paint sign, but bar owner Kevin McCracken said for some, each stroke of the paint brush would have been swiping away at a piece of Bricktown history, until Monday.

About three weeks ago, Wells Fargo filed a lawsuit against McCracken because of the logo.

"Copyright infringement is what they're saying and loss of profits to Wells Fargo,” McCracken said.

The building was built back in 1906 by Wells Fargo and was a livery stable. That history, McCracken says, helped form the businesses current name today. It's a name he wanted on the building when he first opened the business.

"We wanted to paint it back in 2012, but I was told at that time that we couldn't paint over the logo, but after further digging through the city and through the historic society they found out it wasn't an actual part of the building from 1906,” he said.

That digging didn't take much. A simple search of the county assessor's website showed a picture from 2001 of the building without the Wells Fargo logo, but there are guidelines for painting historic buildings.

"Surfaces that haven't already been painted are generally not to be painted, but surfaces that have been painted before can generally be repainted, and in Bricktown it's an issue, because so many of them are brick,” Lisa Chronister, urban design planner for the City of Oklahoma City, said.

It was facade the city wanted to keep up and preserve the historical character of what's left of the original brick of Bricktown.

City officials said you can be fined for painting over anything considered historical and also be held responsible for getting it back to its original state.