Ziegler’s Pharmacy on South Grand Avenue still has a working soda fountain. That’s not a restoration project or a themed pop-up — it’s just what the place has always been, and nobody decided to stop.
Walk in on a weekday afternoon and you might find Gary Ziegler himself behind the counter, the same counter his father stood behind, mixing a Green River or drawing a chocolate Coke from the syrup guns mounted to the back wall. Gary is in his seventies, unhurried, and not especially interested in explaining the history of the place unless you ask. If you do ask, he’ll talk for a while. The pharmacy opened in the 1950s, the soda fountain came with it, and the two have never been separated. Most drugstores ditched their fountains by the 1980s when the economics stopped working. Ziegler’s just kept going.
The fountain itself takes up maybe eight feet of the back wall — chrome fixtures, padded stools worn flat from decades of use, a glass sneeze guard that predates the concept of irony. You can get a phosphate, a float, a hand-dipped cone, or a sundae built to your specifications. The ice cream is Velvet brand, which is an Ohio dairy that’s been around since 1918 and tastes like ice cream is supposed to taste rather than like a product designed to be photographed. A single-scoop cone runs about two dollars and fifty cents. A sundae might get you to five.
The pharmacy half of the building still functions as a pharmacy. Gary fills prescriptions. There are greeting cards and a rack of reading glasses near the front. The linoleum floor has that specific pattern — small flecks on a cream background — that you stopped seeing everywhere else around 1994. It is not curated. It is not restored to look like it did in 1962. It just is what it is because nobody took it apart.
What makes it worth your time isn’t nostalgia tourism, exactly. It’s that the soda fountain is functional and cheap and the person making your drink has been doing it for most of his life. Gary will tell you that Green River — a lime-flavored syrup mixed with carbonated water — was once Springfield’s local drink of choice before it got bought and reformulated and mostly forgotten. He still stocks it. The version he pours isn’t the canned stuff; it’s syrup mixed fresh, and it’s sharp and cold and tastes like a color.
Go on a weekday if you can. Saturdays get a little busier. There’s no line to manage, no QR code menu, no tip prompt on a screen. You sit on a stool, you say what you want, and someone makes it in front of you. The whole transaction takes about four minutes. You can stay as long as you like after that.
Ziegler’s is on South Grand, west of MacArthur, in a stretch of Springfield that doesn’t get much foot traffic anymore. It doesn’t need it. The regulars know where it is, and Gary seems fine with that arrangement. If you’re the kind of person who thinks a working soda fountain in a functioning pharmacy is worth twenty minutes out of your afternoon, you’re right, and you should go soon. Gary isn’t young, and he doesn’t appear to have a succession plan he’s advertising.
