quote:

Out with a friend at a bar, Graham wished he could order wine, but didn’t want a “Sauvignon Blanc” or “Pinot” in stemware when his friend had a can of beer. He bought mancanwine.com that night.
"I wish I could get wine in a can"

quote:

Graham, his wife Marika and his childhood friend Fisk decide to go for it. They source their grapes in California to make sure they’re getting the best product. Marika also grew up in California, so they can crash with her parents during production.
"If not us, then who?"

quote:

They do an homage to Graham and Marika’s firehouse home in Cleveland, OH on the label. Their dog Gracey makes the cut too, of course.
"The dog stays in the picture."

Farmland Park posted:

Syfe posted:

Mancanwhinewine.com Our Story might just be the most hilarious thing ever.

NESguerilla posted:

I like that buildup is the least impressive thing you'll ever read. Oh wow he owns a tricycle and walks his dog?! incredible!

ThePriceIsRight posted:

Kleen_TheRowdyDog posted:

He's not a fireman, but he lives in an old firehouse. Big boy macho.

Dave Concepcion posted:

well, on the plus side, by putting all that out in the open, their stupid can of repressed homosexuality is effectively impervious to satire

I mean what can you say to ridicule them that they don't already openly admit to?

quote:

It was New Year’s Eve 2009. Marika and Graham had met five months earlier and as Graham picked her up at the Akron airport, the car was packed for a 3,700+ mile road trip – destination MARFA.

Marika and Graham met at the Aspen Ideas Festival in July 2009. She was a scholar, having been selected for her work on the Butaro Hospital in Rwanda. Graham was the “hired help,” producing aspects of the Ideas Festival. The last day of the Festival, they met when she was talking to the scholars coordinator and Graham was walking by. He wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to say hello to a beautiful woman whom he hadn’t yet met. He approached the pair, and that interaction led to an evening of conversation and “bear hunting”- they didn’t see any bears, but a coyote did steal their hot dogs.

One of the topics during the hours of conversation the night they met was Marfa. Both Marika and Graham had heard about it and seen the iconic shot of the Prada store in the desert. So in the burgeoning months of their relationship they decided to set off on an odyssey to Marfa to see the place for themselves.

They rung in 2010 in Nashville, Tennessee, watching the guitar drop. They made their way through Graceland in Memphis, and slept in Bessie Smith’s old room in Clarksdale, Mississippi. They dined at Galatoire’s in New Orleans during a snow storm, went to mission control in Houston, and ate more barbecue than they thought possible.

They arrived in Marfa after a week on the road and a near-miss of being stranded in the desert, and settled into the Thunderbird Motel. They bundled up and explored the Chinati and ate at the Food Shark. The weather was frigid but they immediately understood that this was a special place with a special energy.

After that trip, they felt like Marfa became “theirs.” It was a place they went to celebrate the beginning of their relationship, so it’s a fitting place to celebrate the beginning of their life together. And of course, it’s a great place for a little adventure.

quote:

Saturday Night Party: Mandated Themes – pick one of the five options below. You can GO ALL OUT (recommended) on the theme of your choice, or add just a touch, but we want to be able to tell which you’ve chosen!

Sequins
Giant The Movie (1930s/ Southern)
Minimalist (up for interpretation)
Neon
Lady Gaga

quote:

Marika Shioiri-Clark and Graham Veysey
ENTREPRENEURS, 31 AND 32
WHY THEY'RE INTERESTING: Shioiri-Clark and Veysey don't shy away from big ideas, instead the couple bear-hugs them. Whether they are purchasing the 1854 relic Ohio City Firehouse and whipping its falling-apart walls and wooden beams into a live-work space for themselves, Rising Star Coffee Roasters, Urban Orchid and several independent businesses, or you know, revitalizing a part of Ohio City they've dubbed Hingetown, there's nothing this duo won't tackle together.

SECOND LIFE: Veysey was searching for a space he could both live and work in — he's also a video producer — when a broker approached him and took him on a tour of the long-shuttered Ohio City Firehouse on West 29th Street. Veysey stepped out of the two-story building and immediately called Shioiri-Clark, who was studying architecture in Boston. "I said, 'I'm just walking out of this really cool place, but it's too big and it just doesn't make sense for what we want,' " Veysey says. But when the two looked over the blueprints later, they saw its potential and closed on the building in 2011.

SAFETY FIRST: When Veysey and Shioiri-Clark moved into the firehouse, the surrounding properties were vacant aside from Man's World bar in the Block building across the street. "At first, I was like, Oh God, this neighborhood doesn't feel that safe," Shioiri-Clark says. "My car was broken into a few times when we first moved here, and we had a lot of drug dealing that would happen on the corner." They ended up buying the Block building and closing the bar.

CONNECTIVE TISSUE: The duo welcomed seven businesses — including Kutya Rev Ohio City Dog Haven, Cleveland Tea Revival and Harness Cycle — last year. Since then, a July Cleveland Museum of Art concert series called Ohio City Stages and the Hingetown Sunday Markets hosted by Cleveland Flea founder Stephanie Sheldon has drawn thousands to the street. "It's become a little village within Ohio City, which is great," says Veysey.

EAT UP: After a friend had a great experience at a Detroit potluck-style dinner where hundreds gather to discuss community projects and entrance fees go to the winning idea, Veysey and Shioiri-Clark decided to try it here. The couple hosted the first Cleveland Soup at their apartment in August and were surprised when 100 people showed up. They asked each person to consider a $20 donation and were able to hand $2,000 to the evening's winner, Rust Belt Riders. "We're just going to see if we can do it in a super grassroots way, and if it will catch on," Shioiri-Clark says of the quarterly event.

FAR AND AWAY: The couple is recently engaged and planning their wedding in Marfa, Texas — a southwestern town with a population of fewer than 2,000 people. Neither Veysey nor Shioiri-Clark has ever been there. "It just seemed like a really cool, artsy place," Shioiri-Clark says. "So why not?"

Farmland Park posted:

Rondette posted:

Rondette posted:

God I want to see photos from this wedding to laugh at.

quote:

Graham was the “hired help,” producing aspects of the Ideas Festival.

quote:

he's also a video producer

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Four years ago, Graham Veysey and Marika Shioiri-Clark set out to develop and cultivate their ideal neighborhood. “I wanted to go to a place where I could sink roots down and make an impact,” says 33-year-old Veysey, who owns a video-production company. They bought a former firehouse built in 1854, complete with three poles, and turned one of the old fire-truck bays into their living area. The second floor is now a collection of workspaces, including Veysey’s office and Shioiri-Clark’s design studio. The couple christened their once desolate area of Cleveland Hingetown (it’s the connector of three sections of town: the Warehouse District, the Ohio City Market District, and Gordon Square) and began changing the landscape. They added splashes of public art, flower baskets, and bike racks to the cracked concrete corners and renovated the decrepit building across the street, bringing in eight retail spaces and seven apartments—including a full-time Airbnb unit they use to show off the neighborhood. “If you have an idea, people here say, ‘O.K., let’s try it.’ It’s affordable and accessible, so you can do it and people support you,” says Shioiri-Clark, a 31-year-old architectural designer. “It’s really exciting to feel like I can be part of a small movement.”

Today, the drug dealers and prostitutes that once trafficked the area have been supplanted by millennials, moms and dads pushing baby strollers, and empty-nesters. They come to visit places like Rising Star, a third-wave coffee company started by a former Lockheed Martin executive, and Cleveland Tea Revival, a tea shop run by Michael George and Amber Pompeii, a young couple who boomeranged back from Seattle.
Akron art collectors Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell bought a vacant former trolley transformer station across from the firehouse and renovated it into a 7,500-square-foot contemporary-art space aptly named Transformer Station. “This place, which was a nowhere, toxic corner, has become a destination,” says Fred Bidwell.

Hingetown is now a development hotbed, with more than $70 million in new projects planned in the roughly eight-square-block area. Veysey and Shioiri-Clark credit this to the authentic sense of neighborhood vitality and the fact that residents have taken ownership. “We knew when we went into it that it would be as much a community building project as a real-estate project,” says Shioiri-Clark.

EugeneJ posted:

Why do rich kids always end up being photographers or videographers

quote:

The family moved to the Cleveland area when Veysey was in the first grade. His father, a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War, practiced law. His mother stayed at home, "playing the role of superstar PTA volunteer," as Veysey grew up in suburban Shaker Heights.

Rondette posted:

http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2012/02/newcomer_graham_veysey_touts_y.html

quote:

playing the role of superstar PTA volunteer

quote:

Clark’s car was broken into three times in the first few months of her living in the firehouse. Sex workers and drug dealers were still the most common pedestrians until recently. Despite the art gallery opening up in early 2013 right across from the fire station, the neighborhood still did not feel like a neighborhood as much as an oasis in the middle of destruction.

So in 2012 Veysey and Clark decided to buy the building catty-corner from them, called the Striebinger Block, for $425,000. The building housed the shady gay bars, about 10 apartments (which, according to Veysey, were home mostly to single men who did not pay rent and whose apartments were literally falling to pieces), and a few businesses—a rib joint and a diner among them—that many current Hingetowners seem to think were mostly in the drug business.

“It was obvious that the negative energy and petty crime was coming from the corner of the Striebinger Block,” Clark said. “Everything in this neighborhood was very fortress-like.”

Veysey informed the businesses in Striebinger that if they didn’t improve their image, he’d leave their leases unrenewed. After some handwringing and negotiating, almost everyone moved out. The only remnants of the Striebinger Block are the Dean Rufus House of Fun and a hair salon owned by a woman named Tymeka Greer. Rufus and Greer are some of Veysey’s biggest fans; they say business is up, and their businesses are safer.

quote:

Down the street from Hingetown is a collection of houses owned by a local community activist named Bill Merriman. Merriman charges low rent to people like Paula Kampf, a positive psychology practitioner who considers herself middle class.

On a recent walk around the neighborhood, Kampf told me that at Ohio City community meetings these days, there’s a sense that her neighbors are becoming increasingly against anything—an expansion of a facility for the developmentally disabled, for example—that doesn’t fit into the narrative of Ohio City as upscale and hip.

Rondette posted:

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/theslice/can-graham-veysey-make-cleveland-not-suck

quote:

On a recent walk around the neighborhood, Kampf told me that at Ohio City community meetings these days, there’s a sense that her neighbors are becoming increasingly against anything—an expansion of a facility for the developmentally disabled, for example—that doesn’t fit into the narrative of Ohio City as upscale and hip.

EugeneJ posted:

I can't wait for the day when all these assholes are 80 and there's no wheelchair ramps around

EugeneJ posted:

I can't wait for the day when all these assholes are 80 and there's no wheelchair ramps around

Rondette posted:

so, yeah.

Oh god I can't stop digging.

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2015/09/hingetown-neighborhood-cleveland

KoRMaK posted:

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck this is like a couple blocks from me lol.

I'm one of the millnails near hingetown. If thats the firehouse i think it is then thats where a flower store and a coffee shop is in. Didnt know people lived there.


They are probably nice people.

ThePriceIsRight posted:

quote:

Out with a friend at a bar, Graham wished he could order wine, but didn’t want a “Sauvignon Blanc” or “Pinot” in stemware when his friend had a can of beer. He bought mancanwine.com that night.
"I wish I could get wine in a can"

naem posted:

We're just a couple of hip young 37 year olds who've "boomeranged" back to dads house from paying $3500 a month rent in Brooklyn/Seattle/etc and we're all frustrated because we feel entitled to feel like rich people but can't really afford it- heck I drink wine at bars! That's how fancy I am!

EugeneJ posted:

What is a DINK who doesn't work - NINK (No Income No Kids)?

EugeneJ posted:

What is a DINK who doesn't work - NINK (No Income No Kids)?

Farmland Park posted:

Rondette posted:

http://www.cleveland.com/open/index.ssf/2012/02/newcomer_graham_veysey_touts_y.html

quote:

Nantucket, where Veysey spent summers with his grandparents...

quote:

The Wall Street Journal featured Veysey in a 2006 article -- not for his work at Plum, but for advancing to the finals of a New York City moustache contest.

naem posted:

If these people started a business like a factory of some sort that employed local people and paid them a living wage they would actually be benefiting their oval community.

As is they are squatting in some depressed property and putting a dive bar out of business, living off of dad