The Iron Horse Saloon, for years a popular hangout for bikers in Daytona Beach, has moved out of the Main Street area rather than comply with city redevelopment plans.

The rough-and-tumble bar that has featured female mud wrestling and is known to bikers all over the country will reopen Monday along U.S. Highway 1 north of Ormond Beach.

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Owner Bill Stevens said he chose to move rather than renovate the property at his expense. The building at 9 South Grandview Ave. where 12,000 cans of beer a day were served during Motorcycle Week last March has been razed.

Stevens said the Main Street redevelopment program is needed, but the renovations would change the atmosphere that has made the Iron Horse famous.

The bar has been featured in biker magazines. Stevens mails T-shirts, buttons and other souvenirs throughout the nation and in seven foreign countries.

“There is nothing wrong with the pastel colors and the trees and flowers they are using on Main Street, but that just wasn’t what we wanted to do,” Stevens said. “It was our choice to leave.”

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He predicted the Main Street renovation will drive bikers away from the strip that has been a gathering place for tens of thousands of bikers during Motorcycle Week.

“By 1989, the Main Street merchants will see a drastic decrease in the amount of money spent there,” he said.

City officials say they are not trying to get rid of bikers, who spend millions of dollars during their stay. They are trying to clean up Main Street to make it more attractive to families, who have shunned the area in recent years. City planners want to make Main Street an attractive, safe year-round shopping and entertainment area.

Daytona Beach Police Capt. Barry Neall said the thousands of motorcycle riders who flock to the area to see the races at the Daytona International Speedway or to admire the custom choppers won’t stay away from Main Street simply because it is spruced up.

“The ones with tattoos who take pride in looking raunchy might stay away,” said Neall, supervisor of detectives. “But as far as I’m concerned, good riddance.”

Stevens said his new location at 1068 North U.S. Highway 1 in a rural area near the Ormond Beach Airport will be better equipped than the old Iron

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Horse to handle the large bike week crowds.

His property includes a large lot, which could handle the overflow of patrons when the bar is full. He has enough land for parking and barbecues, he said.

Customers will be able to drink beer outside. The new bar is in an unincorporated area governed by county, which, unlike Daytona Beach, has no law prohibiting open containers of alcoholic beverages, Stevens said. Plans to build a band stage and a mud wrestling pit also are in the works.

Stevens said the Iron Horse is not strictly a biker bar. Although it is oriented toward bikers, it has a wide variety of patrons, he said. Last year, seven members of the London Symphony Orchestra came to the Iron Horse while they were performing in Daytona Beach. Wearing their white suits, the musicians ate chili, drank beer and played songs on the juke box by country singer and biker David Allen Coe.

Stevens, who sports a short ponytail, a light-brown beard and a tattoo of an Iron Horse, is polite and friendly to visitors. The 39-year-old businessman said his bar has a reputation for being rougher than it really is. “I’ve never been in one fight in the seven years I’ve run the Iron Horse,” Stevens said. But he admitted, “I have been hit from behind a couple of times.”

Police say the bar, which was continually jammed with more than 300 people throughout bike week, attracts a large number of rowdies and “undesirables.” Stevens said he expects Iron Horse Saloon regulars to come to the new location. “We have a hell of a following.”

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