Day 9 – 16 Days of Jackson – Top 10 Local Food Experiences and Rebecca’s One Five One review

As I approach my Jackson arrival anniversary date this spring (Earth Day 2013 was the big, memorable, cold day), I’m looking back on all the dining experiences of the past 9 months after receiving Rebecca Calkins’ 16 Days of Jackson foodie collaboration piece.

Spinach salad at Grand River Marketplace

My Top 10 dining experiences in Jackson County

10. Schlenker’s cheeseburger for lunch (had the pleasure two times already)

9. Knight’s lunch specials (too many to list)

8. Reuben pizza at the Beach Bar on Clark Lake

7. El Mariachi burrito at Chilango’s

6. Spinach salad followed by mussels at Grand River Marketplace

5. Stuffed burger at Blue Moon Cafe

4. Muffin toast egg, swiss and bacon sandwich at BZB

3. The Dahlem veggie burger sandwich at Pickle Barrel

Two Dahlems and one Falling Waters ... delicious!

A Dahlem, a PB&J and one Falling Waters … delicious!

2. Sunday brunch at One Five One (fried chicken and waffles!)

1. Sticky burger at Night Light

My favorite neighborhood restaurant

My Top 9 most memorable dining moments

9. my first Jackson Coney, prepared with beef heart. I can’t believe I ate the whole thing and I won’t do it again.

8. every dining experience under Sue Chapel’s guidance at the Cascades Manor House. Many lunches and several dinners have all lived up and exceeded expectations.

7. Polish breakfast at Bone Island Grill benefiting Disabilities Connections

Galumpkis & pierogies for breakfast!

6. Headliners fashion show and Jackson Rotary Holiday Bash at Grand River Marketplace … great fellowship, loads of delicious food and Fun!

Headliners Fashion Show benefiting Dahlem

5. Sunday brunch at One Five One benefiting Jackson Rotary. From my loaded veggie omelette to the fried chicken and waffle, every taste was surely satisfying.

4. Soups at Blue Moon Cafe — pork, sauerkraut and bean or spinach and bacon, or any of the other signature combinations make for winter treat.

3. Soups at Night Light — the french onion is the signature, but the other varieties prove the voters at the 1st annual Soup Bowl got it right by choosing the one and only Night Light.

2. The best breakfast sandwich in town, hands down: BZB’s muffin toast egg sandwich. I’ve tried it with pepper jack or swiss with bacon. I’m stuck on the swiss option for now and never order anything else on their loaded menu.

1. Cascades Ice Cream Company. A root beer float and two coneys. And my $8.25 IOU inspiring a “How Jackson of You” speech, leading to 16 Days of Jackson and rodmalloy.com

what started it all

Here is Rebecca’s One Five One review –

For a small to medium town, Jackson has a lot of restaurants. In fact, I’ve heard that Jackson has a very high restaurant per capita ratio. Us Jacksonians, we love to go out to eat. Jackson is a town of foodies, some blue collar steak and potatoes kinds of foodies, some gourmet filet mignon kind of foodies and sometimes both. We love our restaurants in Jackson. It’s always a hot topic when a restaurant is closing or a new restaurant is coming to town.

Being a foodie myself I am always looking to try the newest restaurants and newest dishes. So when I was planning a celebratory dinner I had to try out one of the newer restaurants in Jackson, One Five One. In fact, I heard they had a new menu with lower prices! Bonus! Now I’ll admit I wasn’t the biggest fan of the restaurant that occupied this location before, but I must say the menu has improved significantly as One Five One. We started with appetizers of course. The first was Goat Cheese Cake, goat cheese baked in a garlic tomato sauce garnished with two black olives, creating a delicious face staring up at me. Served with toasted bread to smear the delicious combination on I was in heaven. Our second appetizer was fried asparagus and I must say I am always a big fan of taking anything healthy and making it delicious and slightly less good for you.

Beware what lurks in the bowls of 151

Mmmmm. The magic of asparagus. Green is good.

For my drink I decided I wanted to try a Dirty Martini because I have always wanted to try one and well I love olives. It was very olive-y to say the least but it was definitely a good pour and now I can check that off the bucket list.

Olive-y sensation

For the main course I got a classic, One Five One Filet Mignon. I got my 6 ounce filet a little red at medium and with the classic baked potato, it was perfection. For those of you that don’t want your cow still mooing my dining companions were happy with their well-done steaks as well.

A fine filet

On to the dessert… The flourless chocolate torte was as rich and decadent as expected served with a raspberry sauce and a dollop of whip cream. The white chocolate bread pudding was topped with a crème anglaise, or a delicious custard-y sauce, and more whip cream.

Chocolate!

Bread pudding

Overall One Five One is not nearly as highfalutin as you might think. The menu is as identifiable and relatable as your average steakhouse or full service chain yet fancy enough to make you feel like you are truly having a night on the town.

I did make it back for lunch and, me being me, I did order the most unique thing on the menu, duck lettuce wraps. But my more traditional dining companions were still able to find something to suit their palettes.

There are a lot of great new restaurants around Jackson with Grand River Marketplace, Chase Bar & Grill, Chilango’s Burrito Bar and even down in Brooklyn with The Pointe and Shady’s Tap Room, great Michigan beer on tap and a really delicious Reuben sandwich on the menu.

Or new to me when I finally made a stop at South Side Deli for what claims to be the best steak hoagie in Jackson. It was amazing by the way but order ahead if you are stopping at lunchtime. It seems many more people know about this best kept secret than I thought.

So whether you are the kind of foodie with a highfalutin flourless chocolate torte kind of palette or a blue collar greasy spoon steak hoagie kind of palette or both, Jackson has something to satisfy everyone’s tastes. Go to http://www.experiencejackson.com/restaurants/ to find your new favorite Jackson restaurant.

~Rebecca Calkins

Day 8 – 16 Days of Jackson Classic Ragtime Tune Penned by 16-Year-Old Welcomes Bill Bailey to JACKSON

Community Engagement

Won’t You Come Home

by Bill Bailey

Italy is regarded for its inspiration of Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts is the namesake of Henry David Thoreau’s famous novel. Jamaica is known as the birthplace of Bob Marley’s reggae music.People often associate great art with the place it was created. For me, Jackson makes me think of Hughie Cannon’s song, “(Won’t You Come Home) Bill Bailey?”

Zelda Sheldon performs the Jackson classic in Sydney, Australia on her ukulele, 9,405 miles from the song’s origin. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wp9cYvQsA2Q

Okay. This old ragtime song probably hasn’t reached Mona Lisa status and of course most people born prior to 1970 have never heard it, but it was created right here in Jackson and Jacksonians take pride in that. Believe me…I’ve heard it from time to time.

In my short tenure here I have had this song sung at me about 50,000 times. When I was growing up in Muskegon this song was sung to me any time I introduced myself to someone familiar with early 20th century jazz, but never as much as I’ve heard it from people in Jackson.

As it was told to me by a proud patron of the BZB Cafe on Mechanic St., who was coincidentally also named Bill,“(Won’t You Come Home) Bill Bailey?” was created in the bars of Frogtown, the area downtown near the Grand River. It was written by a 16-year-old, Detroit native Hughie Cannon, and inspired by trombonist Willard “Bill” Bailey, for whom the song got it’s title. As it goes, Cannon and Bailey frequented the taverns of old Jackson despite Mrs. Bailey’s pleas for her husband to please come home. Cannon was so inspired he produced one of the biggest ragtime hits of his time.

Cannon’s song soon met notoriety as the likes of Louis Armstrong, Patsy Cline, Harry Connick Jr., and most recently Michael Buble immortalized Bailey’s wife’s wishes for her husband to be domesticated. By the 1950s Jackson residents would soon take pride in the ditty that garnered international fame and claimed their city to be the conception point of one of the world’s most famous showtunes.

Like the Buick, Ritz Cracker, and the Republican Party, “(Won’t You Come Home) Bill Bailey?” is now known as one of Jackson’s great contributions to society. Although the song may not be as great a piece of history as the Grand Old Party or an iconic automobile, Jacksonians to this day brag about the song’s origins in their beloved city.

Of course, no one would know this better than I, Bill Bailey. I made this city my home five months ago. While I claim no relationship to the man for which the famous song was named, I do feel connected to the City of Jackson because of it. I don’t believe a newcomer could ever ask for a better welcoming than to have a personalized song begging him, “please come home.” Although this song may have been written far before my time, to me it seems very appropriate that it was written in a city so willing to accept outsiders — a special city like no other, our Jackson.

Here’s Brenda Lee’s upbeat version: :http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_TGpSotYqM

Victory Lane, between Restaurant One Five One and Bella Notte in Downtown Jackson

Bill Bailey – J.D. McDuffie #70 tribute wheel in Victory Lane

Think about it … a song written in Jackson has had worldwide impact spanning four generations, from Louis Armstrong to Brenda Lee to The Jetsons to The Simpsons, even The Smurfs! A 16-year-old songwriter’s simple song will live on and continue to thrive in our continually recycled, inspiring American culture.

Day 7 – 16 Days of Jackson Armory Arts & Art 634 Communities Burst with Art and Light

Community Engagement

From Indentured Servants and Prison Laborers, to Wage Slaves and Starving Artists

by Evan Farmer

Consider the historical record of the ghosts who live at the building on N. Mechanic Street that now houses Art 634. Often times I’ve wondered how many poltergeists wander the old wooden floors of the back gallery, and what variety of tortured ancient souls pass between the planes of existence before me. Their stories would lead us into the lives of men, young and old, who were bought and sold into the injustice of forced prison labor. The brutal and cold system of corrections that was simultaneously birthed next door to the shops at the 600 block of North Mechanic produced a workforce of demented and diseased state enslaved servants who made binder twine, wagon wheels, and farm implements, among other things.

Withington Cooley Shop building, today’s Art 634 in Jackson, Michigan

Today, the old Michigan State Prison has been re-purposed and made into housing for creative folks of all sorts. And there are still bars on the windows of the ground level studio spaces that have been set aside for the artists who now live in the Armory Artswalk Apartments. Though some may be “starving artists,” none have been forced to work on the chain gang, and in place of the manufacturing companies that were right next door, a collection of arts oriented shops and studios have been born. Art 634 has been building a new industry built on art and ingenuity, free enterprise and creativity. In place of the opportunistic spirit of nineteenth century industrialization, a community of artistic entrepreneurs has blossomed.

Art 634 after a mid-December snowfall

Throughout the mid to late 1800s, convicts from the State Prison were employed by early Jackson manufacturers such as Pinney, Connable & Company, which later became the Withington & Cooley Company, until the 1930’s when Acme Industries moved in. The prisoners were paid a measly wage, somewhere around thirty to fifty cents a day, and were incarcerated under the deplorable “Auburn” style prison system, where they were forced into hard labor, subjected to the ball and chain and the lash, and lived amidst generally harsh conditions in a chronically overcrowded facility. The prison laborers received none of the wages they worked for, though the industries they worked so hard to help build, and the capitalists who established them, benefited greatly.

In this way, the “contract” labor of our state’s first prison system effectively continued the American tradition of indentured servitude. In all likelihood, many of those who were housed at the prison and worked in the North Mechanic Street shops, were descendants of former slaves who were born into a life of abject poverty and were nearly forced into a life of crime. By extension, that institution has continued even to this day, through the wage slave jobs provided by modern factories, and now huge multinational corporations such as McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. No doubt, there are numerous families who live in Jackson today who have been essentially kept imprisoned and enslaved by the legacy of slavery and prison labor, which has continued the tradition of low paying jobs that cannot provide a basic living wage for many ex-convict employees and other uneducated workers.

The heritage of our past can be a difficult pattern to break away from. The reverberations of historical injustices can resonate even through the present, if we are unable to reconcile and heal the collective memory we share of that oppression and pain. Art 634 has begun the curative work of transforming this place in Jackson that was once the cold, dark heart of our city. Through drawing, painting, dance, music, and other fine arts, we can facilitate the process of healing by projecting a more positive focus of energy into the spaces we inhabit. And hopefully the ghosts that we encounter amongst these artistic endeavors will be inspired to release that pain, and be liberated from the negative experiences that keep haunting them and continue lingering in the present.

http://www.michigan.gov/msi/0,4642,7-174-23878-65447–,00.html

http://blog.mlive.com/citpat_history/2007/10/prison_was_industrial_center.html

Mechanic Street Sign Pointing to Armory Arts Village

Armory Arts Village Began With a Flourish, Primed for a Great Future

by Rod Malloy

Armory Arts Village began as a community redevelopment project with broad local leadership support and a vision to transform National Guard Armory and historic State Prison buildings into a Village with Artswalk Apartments. The dream became a reality in 2006 and Ann Arbor architects Quinn Evans received the 2006 Michigan State award for most innovative renovation of a historic building for the project.

http://www.quinnevans.com/portfolio/neighborhoods-communities/armory-arts-village

Quinn Evans’ website describes Armory Arts Village:

In a city long known for its blue-collar manufacturing industry and prison, QEA is playing a central role in cultural and economic revitalization. We led the adaptation of three historic prison buildings (more recently re-purposed as a National Guard Armory), to create an arts neighborhood with 62 affordable live/work lofts. In addition, the structures feature shared workspace for resident performing and visual artists, artisans and designers, including a two-story industrial arts production space, studios, as well as first-floor galleries, a coffee shop and retail space.

The coffee shop and retail space did not come to fruition and the two-story production space enjoyed a short-lived history as a spacious art gallery doubling as a special event venue. Jackson Journeys Historic Prison Tours and Paranormal Tours also flourished during the early years of Armory Arts Village. https://www.historicprisontours.com/

Armory Artswalk Apartments are well designed and beautiful. Residents love them, including resident artists Jean Weir and Cahty Walters.

Nighttime with snow at Armory Artswalk Apartments

Jean Weir’s creative space in her first floor loft apartment

Cathy Walters’ artful apartment

Early residents of the Armory Artswalk Apartments could pick their cell block / apartment after the December 15, 2006 grand opening. The first 22 residents were all artists including musicians, sculptors, dancers, opera performers and metal workers, including African-inspired art by a Sudanese artist. In the beginning there was “lots of talent, a dream come true for many artists,” commented Jean Weir.

Armory Artswalk Apartment longtime residents Judy Gail Krasnow, Louis Cubille and Jean Weir in Jean’s loft apartment

The 62 apartment units housed 40 artists in the beginning, today among the 62 apartment residents, only 10 artists call 100 Armory Court home. The Armory Arts Community seeks younger artists, and actively pursues opportunities to promote the community and to bring back Jackson Journey Tours and the two-story gallery space.

The Armory buildings were first renovated during World War II, were occupied during the Gulf Wars and vacated by the National Guard in 1996. The recent renovation and preservation project involved the Artspace group in St. Paul, MN when the renovations targeted the ACME buildings further south on Mechanic Street. Artspace inspired several art elements of the project, but exited the project when the focus turned to renovating the historic prison buildings.

http://www.mlive.com/living/jackson/index.ssf/2010/02/peek_through_time_eyesore_acme.html

First Floor Armory Artswalk Apartments

Prison bars preserved at Armory Artswalk Apartments

Two other buildings are included in the Armory Arts Village complex. A pink building added by the National Guard houses the local bike rehab project. Louis Cubille started the bike repair project at Art 634 as an after school program 12 years ago. Louis’ studio was in the current Cuppa Coffee Company location. The other building located behind the apartments building and inside the historic prison wall is the State Prison mess hall building. In the 1970s the community rallied to protect the prison wall against forces wanting to tear it down.

State Prison Mess Hall Building

Today, the small community of Armory artists offer art classes to adults and children. Dreams of an Academy carry on in the community. Cathy Walters is the community promoter, despite just six months of residence. “We’d like to build better relationships with Art 634, the Jackson Artists Alliance, and with promotion partners,” she shared. “It became full-time work when I became disabled with fibromyalgia and polyarthroalga. I paint because I love to. For many of us our art is our work and our work takes a lot of our time.” Cathy’s art includes beautiful art journals made from recycled brown paper bags.

Art journals made from recycled brown paper bags

“I love this community. I have met amazing people. This group of artists have loved me and cared for me through my illness.” — Cathy Walters

Armory Arts Village site plan and Artist Directory

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