3/20/2023 0 Comments Reminisce sports cafeShe gave up her last shifts in 2016 when she had a child with her husband, the musician and artist Charles Chace, whose abstract paintings shine like flaking yellow mirrors in the morning light. I’m not really a risk-taker.”Īt 50, she is tall and impervious, with a mass of dark, steely curls and the calm, steady demeanor it takes to tend the wildlife of a bar. “People would be like, ‘Oh my god, opening a business, you’re rolling the dice, what a gamble!’” Mesigian said one recent morning at OCSC. She thought the motley mansion of the indie scene needed a living room, and it didn’t take long for time to prove her right. No shows, no food, no frills-just cheap beer, stiff highballs, and a clean, cozy place to meet and talk to celebrate or grieve to waste a few hours or unwind a few years. She was 29 years old and, in the past year, had quit her job at Merge Records, toured Europe with David Byrne, and then hauled him back to play at Cat’s Cradle-the music-scene nucleus whose crowd, she was certain, would swarm to the bar she was about to open, strategically located two blocks away.įrom the rhythm of her own nightlife, she’d identified a need for a “middle-night” place that welcomed younger patrons but catered to slightly older ones. The same music scenesters who had hammered the dimples into its copper top were now the first customers, and many of those scenesters are still installed at what they call “the deep end” of the bar (nearest the back patio, where you can smoke), growing mossier and more iconic by the year. The purple paint was fresh on the wavy cubbyholes above the bar. Matt Neal, a founding employee, who cofounded Neal’s Deli around the corner, was sweeping up the last drywall dust. That weekend, the mayor would come to cut a ribbon, but this was a quiet Wednesday. It was September 26, barely two weeks after 9/11. The Rexall sign finally came down in the mid-1980s, and the left side of 108 East Main harbored a series of relatively fleeting concerns (a telemarketing office, a screen printer, a web hosting company) until the day in 2001 when the Orange County Social Club, a local landmark for a new century, opened for the first time. It had a sandwich counter and great orangeade, according to Richard Ellington, the Carrboro historian who helped me clear up a tricky point in this account.nea Circa 1950, he moved into a larger building next door, hanging a Rexall sign above the inviting metal canopy at 108 East Main, where Senter Drug, alongside the immortal Friendly Barber Shop, would anchor the block for decades. Merritt did business in an annex on Marks’s store for a time, which was then rented by the druggist P. Marks had built in brick, and after the fire, the other store owners followed his lead, mortaring up the durable, weathering street we stroll today. Marks’s dry goods store, which still stands as Bank of America. In 1924, a fire sparked in a boarding house at 102 East Main, where the shell of Tyler’s Taproom is now, and burned down most of the block-except for R. Some of the buildings were new and others had been moved. By the 1920s, the booming district had all kinds of stores, including a pool parlor, a candy kitchen, and J. Ron Liberti's Dean Smith portrait on the wall at OCSC | Photo by Brett VillenaĪbout a century ago, Carrboro’s commercial center shifted from Weaver Street to East Main Street, according to an architectural inventory the town published in 1983.
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