History and high hopes

The Creole brings spice and steam to an Old Town landmark

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A fresh coat of paint works wonders for most fixer-uppers, but Alan Hooper’s painting hands were tied when he set out to convert Lansing’s former Creole Gallery into the Creole, a Cajun themed restaurant, bar and coffee shop.

The lease for 1218 Turner St. has an unusual clause: Do not touch the walls. Would you spackle the Catacombs or slap vinyl siding on the Parthenon?

The Creole Gallery, closed since 2012, was the epicenter of Old Town’s resurgence in the 1990s and 2000s and home to hundreds of art shows and concerts. About 130 years ago, the same brick building housed the Creole Cigar Factory, along with a seed and grain shop.

Next week, the autumnal, peeling yellow and brown walls will get their first taste of spice and steam when the Creole opens for business Aug. 20.

The Creole is the latest and weightiest project yet for the Potent Potables Project —restaurateur Sam Short, property development and construction specialist Hooper and attorney Aaron Mathews — the team that brought Old Town’s moribund Zoobie’s bar back to life and added a popular new woodfired pizza joint, Cosmos, next door.

Short’s team is also working on a gourmet taqueria to replace the derelict gas station at the corner of Homer and Saginaw streets in Frandor, set to open early this winter.

The potent team will need all of its potency to pull off the Creole, an ambitious, historically fraught venture that takes in two adjoining spots on Turner Street. The former Creole Gallery itself will house a sit-down, “fine casual” restaurant and bar specializing in Cajun food and with a highend, Zoobie’s-esque wine and beer selection. The space next door, where the most recent tenant was Whipped Bakery, will become the Creole Coffee Co., serving breakfast, lunch, coffee and sweets. One kitchen will serve both spaces, linked by an interior doorway.

To evoke the atmosphere of southern Louisiana, Short had to cook up a gumbo of adjectives.

“That French-revival-farmhousecrumbling-paint-faded-glory-New Orleans feel is so beautiful,” he said. “We want to keep that feel as much as possible.”

Out of respect for the Creole’s history, Short’s team has done a quiet make-over with minimal impact. A copper-topped bar extends from the front window down the old gallery’s north wall. The tall stage and wall partition in back are gone, making the space a bit larger, but it’s unmistakably the Creole. The old church pew where musicians once sat when the stage got too crowded won’t be far from its old spot.

“And we haven’t touched the walls,” Short said.

Hooper found some interesting things in the building during the renovation, including a stash of 115-year-old canceled checks from the Creole Cigar Co. The oldschool calligraphy on the checks will be re-cycled for the Creole Coffee Co. logo.

Hooper has been sifting through stacks of pictures showing the Creole as a cigar factory, a hardware store and a derelict building with boarded up windows.

“It’s just kind of survived, and everything’s ebbed and flowed around it,” Hooper said.

Short moved to Lansing in 2010 from Chicago and never met its former owner, Robert Busby, but he knows the Creole is no ordinary space.

Busby brought the Creole’s shell back from decades of neglect, culminating in a 1982 fire, to become the heart of Old Town’s resurgence. In its heyday, the Creole hosted bluesmen John Sinclair and Mose Allison, jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and dozens of other national acts. The Creole Gallery was on the verge of taking a place among the nation’s top small clubs in 2007, when Busby was killed by a handyman he had taken in.

“I’ve heard so much about Robert, and walking into the space, you can see that someone took serious time building it,” Short said. “It was a passion project.”

Many restoration projects, including Zoobie’s, involve tearing down decades of bad decisions, from drop ceilings to shag carpet.

Hooper said the Creole job was simpler.

“Robert already revealed the beauty of this building,” he said. “It was our job not to ruin that.”

After Busby died, the gallery went to his daughter, Ena Busby, who kept it going with art shows, rental events and sporadic concerts, but full-time work and kids made it difficult for her to give the space full attention.

In 2013, Ena Busby sold the building to longtime Old Town champion Jamie Schriner-Hooper, a former director of the Old Town Commercial Association and Hooper’s wife. The Hoopers moved into the apartment upstairs and leased the gallery to Short’s team.

The Creole Gallery led Old Town into its modestly gritty, Oldsmobile-bohemian heyday of art and music over 10 years ago. Short hopes to put The Creole back at the center of Old Town as it rolls into its latest phase: a flourishing wave of locally owned eateries, shops, non-profits and businesses — short on grit but tightly knit and allergic to chain-store blandness.

“We hope we can be part of that second wave, that expansion of a city that is starting to have some really interesting things happen in it,” Short said.

Short wants music to remain a part of the Creole, but it’s unclear how that will work out in practice. The gallery’s old stage has been rebuilt into a flexible and mobile platform for musicians. The wood on top of the stage is from the original.

Short is hoping for two or three days of live music a week, focusing on blues, jazz, funk and soul, with perhaps a Gospel brunch on Sunday. The venerable Cliff Bell’s nightclub in downtown Detroit was an inspiration.

“To have that combination of dining and jazz or blues, an engaged music experience — that’s really unique,” Short said. “Not a lot of places have that feel. We thought Old Town, if anywhere in Lansing, has the vibe where that can happen.”

Short’s team has consulted with Meegan Holland, who booked the Creole Gallery in its glory days, but they have no formal arrangement.

It was Holland who suggested the stage be dismantled to make more room for seating.

“Some people may be upset that the stage is gone, but I think it’s a good move,” Holland said. “Robert owned the building, so he had the luxury of keeping it as a listening room of 100 seats, no food or liquor sales.”

With about 150 seats in both spaces combined, it remains to be seen whether Short’s team will be able to book artists of the caliber the Creole Gallery hosted back in the day.

“I’m not interested in booking back ground music,” Holland said. “But I am thrilled with whatever they do. I trust those guys. They’ll do it up right. You have to make money, and they know how to do it.”

Foot traffic in Old Town has grown painfully slowly over the past 15 years, but Short and Hooper aren’t worried about that. A lot of people told Short he was nuts to invest in Old Town’s eastern fringe, and now the wait can exceed an hour and a half at Cosmos on weekends.

“A place that’s cool enough — people will drive to it. Golden Harvest has 30 people in line on a Tuesday in February,” Short said.

When Short took on Zoobie’s, a once sleepy bar at the far eastern fringe of Old Town, he felt an undercurrent of trepidation he didn’t show to his partners. The Creole, he said, is a different animal.

“With the stampede of interest and overwhelming support we’ve had here, no way,” he said. “I don’t know why you’d go to another part of town to open a business.”

Short and his team hope The Creole will be the major destination restaurant Old Town has lacked for decades.

“We always wondered why there wasn’t a more intensive dining scene in Old Town,” Hooper said.

It will gladden many hearts just to see the Creole light up again. Hooper doesn’t seem worried about living up to its storied history.

“We can’t live up to what the past was,” Hooper said. “The past speaks for itself and it’s the foundation for everything that’s happening now. We just want to be worthy.”

He added one more reason to do the job well.

“I can’t hide from this because I live upstairs.”

 

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