First of all, it's important to point out that, for a while, briefly, there was a bar at The Bailey. Perrenoud's Cocktail Bar opened in October 2022 and held Friday/Saturday services most weekends until March 2023 when I pulled the plug on what had felt like a perpetual "soft opening" that wasn't actually getting any closer to a grand opening. The idea was that we'd put the finishing touches on all the little details while were open and learning; the reality is we were a very long way from a final product. And worse, with every service we were teaching our guests that this is who we are, what we wanted to be, developing a reputation and identity but without many of the most important pieces in place.

I need to be clear that I'm not throwing any of our staff under the bus. I take full accountability for not providing a complete vision, definitive leadership, the right tools and deliverables, and a personal presence to help make this first foray more successful. And genuinely, I'm not even suggesting that Perrenoud's was bad. Our drinks were top-notch, clever and delicious. The physical space was beautiful. Our service was fast and professional. Many people liked it. Some loved it.

It just wasn't what I'd set out to create. It wasn't the vibe I had wanted to bring to Humboldt. And we weren't creating the kinds of experiences and memories that I wanted to people to share. Turns out, those kinds of fundamental details of identity are not something you can just tweak into existence during a soft opening.

So here I am, 9 months later, and still trying to figure it all out for our proper, long-term opening. While there are still a ton of unanswered questions, I'm renewed and reinvigorated by the opportunity a bar at The Bailey represents and I geniuinely feel closer than ever at answering those questions I posed back in my "On Making Decisions" post about what this bar needs to be. Perhaps I'll try to articulate those insights in another post, soon.

For now, while we're merely taking stock of our current situation, I'll submit this to-do list, an accounting of the biggest things that will need to be figured out before we open our doors again:

• Hire a bar manager. While I recognize that I'll need to be much more present in gatekeeping the details, I'm not likely to be the bartender or bar manager. (If you may be interested, please reach out.)
• Finish the buildout. There are little details (and big ones!) that will make a huge impact on how it feels to be in the bar, and I'll need to wrap those up before we open. The bright kitchen cannot feel so present; the airy front room cannot steal a sense of intimacy; art will soon provide the place a new life.
• Tighten up our identity, aligning the branding, culture, service, music, menu and more with a well-articulated description of the bar's soul. This has always been my biggest challenge, but I've never felt closer.
• An accessible entrance. The current east entrance is dangerously awkward. A forthcoming sidewalk makeover should take care of that.
• An ambitious program. A bar like this is a foreign experience, and so we'll have to create an engaging, active, and safe program of opportunities for people to test the waters.

Easy peasy.

More soon.

In the case of our building, the history is long and varied. I spent several late nights digging through Newspapers.com, piecing together as complete a chronology of the building as I could, which I then compiled into not one, but two posts on our Humboldt History Facebook page (it took two posts because a single post maxed out Facebook's length limit!). Not all of the history is that interesting or relevant, so I don't blame you if you don't want to pore over those extremely long posts. (There are plenty of amusing anecdotes, so if you enjoy that kind of thing, it may be worth your time). Of course not every project needs to benefit from some detail from its past; and sometimes there's very little of importance to uncover anyway.

But for my purpose here, I quickly latched onto one notable character from my research: the Swiss immigrant who built the building in 1904, a jeweler named Louis Perrenoud. (As a native-born Swiss man, his name would have been pronounced "Lou-ee Pair-eh-new").

Louis Perrenoud moved to Humboldt somewhat early, in 1874, "with the grasshoppers" as he said. By 1877, he had purchased and moved his jewelry business to the northeast corner of the square, where the Bailey currently sits. There he built a two-story frame building (shown above) that survived until 1904, when he erected our current, elegant brick building: "50x80 feet, two stories high and basement under the entire building. There will be two store rooms on the first floor, the second floor being arranged for offices."

Right away I recognized Mr. Perrenoud as a character who could inspire our cocktail lounge project. Not only did his trade—jewelry—lend itself to lots of potential design motifs (jewel tones, precious metals, gemstone shapes, spectacles, monocles, clocks and pocketwatches) but he was the real—and mostly forgotten—founder of the building we've all come to call "The Bailey." For the first 20 or so years (1904-late 1920s) the building was actually referred to as the Perrenoud Building. To some extent, I feel an obligation to revive a familiarity with his name, even as foreign and difficult to pronounce as it first seems.

Louis was a beloved businessman who developed a reputation for doing things right. That is, he valued quality, craft and precision. His trade, of course, required it, but it seemed also that he just cared a great deal for the little details. One article described his home as "handsome and commodious, and emphasizes one of Mr. Perrenoud's characteristics: that whatever he attempts to do, he does well." My man.

Perrenoud's

Would the patriarch of our building lend his name for an upscale cocktail bar? Sure. It's a classy name. Exotic sounding. Elegant in both its textual form and on the tongue, and the truest honor to the history of the building. It may be a little tricky for people to pronounce at first, but it's teachable—pair-uh-news; and if not, we'll encourage a more approachable, casual form: Perry's. "Meet me at Perry's after work?" Okay, sure. See you there.

So we've got a name. Perrenoud's. And we've got a relevant vibe to riff on when selecting materials, colors, and other design elements. Early 1900s jewelry store.

Unfortunately, I haven't uncovered any great anecdotes or otherwise useful information about the Perrenoud family. Louis had just one son, John, who ran a highly-praised dairy farm (with the badass name Neosho Breeze), but having no children of his own, the Perrenoud family name died out with John's wife Lena in 1983. Many locals will recall the Perrenoud farm at the south edge of town, now fenced off as part of the Monarch Cement quarry property.

Our building itself has almost no physical reminders of Mr. Perrenoud or his jewelry shop. Except one. In the front room, under the stairs, is a cement-encased, steel-door security vault that's still adorned with a hand-painted pastoral scene and, above, the name "L. Perrenoud". It's an amazing little feature of the building, and an artifact that deserves to be paid some special attention of its own when the inspiration comes. We'll file that away for later.

The Bailey

So L. Perrenoud built the building, ran a jewerly store there for 30 years, the newspapers called it the Perrenoud Building for decades after the fact, but today most people in Humboldt don't even recognize the name, and the building is generally known as The Bailey. So who is Bailey, and how did he come to lay his name on our building?

It wasn't until 1911 that Bill Bailey and his wife Hattie expanded their existing hotel next door (in the building currently being remodeled for another ABH bar) into the upstairs of the Perrenoud building, connected through an interior doorway. For the next 30 years, even after the death of Mr. Bailey in 1931, their hotel and cafe continued to dominate the building's identity, while an endless string of tenants passed through the store rooms on the ground floor. Barber shops, gift stores, cafes, millenries, offices, laundry, billiards, a newspaper, photo studio, and so on. Hattie and daughter Edna Bailey continued to run the hotel until the early 1950s, when Hattie died at 80 years old.

In the late 1990s, local son Paul Finney resurrected the name "The Bailey Hotel" for his ambitious renovation of the building, and thereby renewed familiarity with the name in the minds of locals. His hotel closed in 2005, but since then the building has not hosted anything more memorable, so the name continues to stick. Indeed, we've decided to adopt that familiar name for our own reincarnation of the hotel, reopening sometime next year. "The Bailey" will persist.

And with that, we'll close the book on our retrospective, and pick up next time back in the present day; but not without a few jewels of inspiration collected from the past for the many decisions to come.

Thoughts? Let me know at josh@abolderhumboldt.com.

I’ve been poking at this idea for nearly two years now, and while COVID threatened to derail the entire project just as I was getting going, a whole host of things has recently stirred me to renew my commitment to it.

The project is just one of many I've taken up in recent years under the umbrella of A Bolder Humboldt (ABH), the non-profit development group my siblings, my wife and I, and a couple friends organized in 2017. We renovate buildings, transform properties, design, develop and run businesses, organize community events, and more, all in an effort to provide a rich cultural future for our little, industrious community of Humboldt, Kansas (pop: 1800), whose downtown desperately needed some investment and energy after years of disuse and decay.

The prospect of being completely open about this process—of sharing the sometimes-ugly and slow reality of bringing an A Bolder Humboldt project to life—is new and a bit uncomfortable. My natural posture is to paper over the windows and work in the shadows, only offering up a finished product in a sort of grand reveal. Most of the time, that's an underwhelming conclusion. I find most of the joy and value is in the work itself, in the myriad nitty-gritty debates and decisions. And so I hope to unlock a more interesting version of our process, one focussed on sharing it with others. I think that will be especially true in this case, where I'm very much starting from a position of domain ignorance and uncertainty, and where being open and accountable and vulnerable and collaborative feels beneficial and, perhaps crucial, to the success of this particular business.

The location: a quick orientation…

My bar project—the one I'll be writing about here—is just one of several "drinking establishments" ABH is currently pursuing in town. There's been a lot of work towards (and rumors about) our microbrewery project in the old Wonder Bread depot; this is not that. My pal Paul Cloutier, a fellow ABHer, leads another project renovating the old "Reb's Place" into its own unique thirst parlor. There are others too nascent to even mention.

No, this will be something completely different. Occupying the east half of the ground floor of The Bailey, one of Humboldt’s showiest and most historical buildings (I pieced together its 115-year list of tenants here and here), this project aims to fill the role of the "elegant lobby bar," riffing on the building's identity as our town's local hotel.

Located at the main intersection, at our town's only stoplight, and across the street from our beautiful public square, The Bailey has a prominent place in ABH's revitalization of Humboldt’s downtown. We're already deep in an effort to renovate the building's guest rooms, extending The Bailey's legacy as premium, overnight lodging for out-of-town guests. Fully realized, the building will be a hub of activity for visitors and locals alike. Guest rooms should be available in 2021.

The ground floor has been put to more uses than we have time to cover here. Though the building was most-recently occupied by an offshoot of the Catholic Church, the ground floor was left almost exactly how local booster Paul Finney had operated it as a café and restaurant between 1998 and 2005.

Here are a few pictures of how we found it when we took possession in 2018.

The Bailey is divided into many beautiful spaces. The entirety of the upstairs, as I mentioned, is being renovated into lodging. The downstairs consists of three former dining rooms and a kitchen. The west half most-recently served as storefront and storeroom to the wonderful, locally-owned boutique, Jae & Co.

The east half features two large rooms; the front-most is being used for storage during renovations and will be the subject of its own project in the near future; the back room (seen as the former "Walter Johnson Cafe" above) is the future home of our "hotel lobby-style cocktail bar" and the primary focus of this blog from here on out.

The idea: a sort-of serious bar

This project demands to be quite unlike anything Humboldt’s seen before. It aims to fill a need that, let’s be honest, very few recognize as something that can even exist in a small town, or that "simple townsfolk like us" deserve, and so has felt like an extraordinary risk to take to build. But work like this—the painstaking, detailed, daring effort to bring bold ideas like this to life—is the lifeblood of A Bolder Humboldt. We wholly believe that big cities should not have a monopoly on quality or culture, convenience or beauty. We desire and deserve these things to accompany all the other benefits of small-town life: the pace, the affordability, the meaningful relationships,… the human-scale of it all.

And so we've made it our mission to build the town we want to live in—on the firm belief that we're not alone in these desires. What's driven a lot of the population away from small towns is not an innate inability of them to provide the lifestyle many desire, but because the challenges have been framed in terms that serve no one. I’ve been wrestling with fear of these challenges in all of my projects in Humboldt, but this one in particular has pronounced risks (what if people feel uncomfortable here?), and opportunity costs (surely there's a better use for this space!), and the distinct possibility of failure (all this investment!!). But today I find myself more hopeful than ever in the promise of a bolder Humboldt and big ideas like this one.

I’ve come to describe the concept simply as a “serious bar,” but you may get more traction out of “cocktail bar,” “speakeasy,” or “lounge.” Perhaps conjuring the lobby bar in an upscale downtown hotel would help. Indeed, its location in the historic Bailey building makes that the most attractive, apt analogy. My term of choice—"serious bar"—refers mostly to our approach in preparing cocktails and serving customers: we sweat the details and take that art and craft seriously. It does not necessarily refer to the atmosphere, or the customer experience; it is not a formal, rigid, overly-sophisticated place. On the contrary, we strive to soften the edges of our serious approach to drink-making to make the whole experience approachable and delightful for even the unacquainted. A lot of this mandate comes from my own unease in hyper-formal social situations, but also from a dedication to building environments and experiences that—while elevated from the usual small-town experiences—still feel rooted in Humboldt's industrious, prairieland roots.

While beer and wine, and basic mixed drinks like “rum and coke” or “gin and tonic” will be available, the soul of a serious bar is in its cocktail menu, and each drink’s deliberate and precise execution. Embracing novel, quality ingredients and equipment, and sometimes elaborate recipes comprised of 6 or more ingredients, precisely dosed, the flagship drinks are complex experiences with eye-opening, sensory responses. Despite the 4-day “mixology course” I took in my early-20s, the world of cocktails is mostly a new one to me—and some of what I hope to write about here is my personal development into a greater understanding and appreciation for this world—and yours as well, I hope.

Aesthetically, the environment is dark, rich and textural, full of bold color, warm light, and comforting finishes like hard wood and velvet fabric. Using mostly soft seating, arranged in intimate vignettes, the venue is perfect for a relaxed after-work drink among co-workers, couples and doubles date nights, or an after-dinner respite with friends. While no formal dress code is enforced, the elegant, moody environment demands a modest reciprocation of attention and effort.

And but again: an implementation of this concept that takes itself too seriously is doomed from the start. While our mandate is to provide an experience that no other place in the area even attempts, we balance that gravitas with disarming moments of joy and whimsical approaches to the environment, decor and branding. What that means in practical, implementation details is, of course, yet to be determined.

To start making actual decisions to bring this concept to life, my approach is three-fold:

1) Research the actual history of the building, its owners and tenants and businesses, and their lives. What existed here before The Bailey was built? Why and when was this building constructed, and what types of things existed within its walls? What elements of that history are formative, interesting, and compelling enough to co-opt into modern use? For me, this starts with poring over old newspapers, and documenting the revelations I discover.

2) Learn as much as I can about the bar industry, hospitality, the art of craft cocktails, the architectural and design traditions and innovations of drinking establishments, and begin to narrow my focus on a particular approach to both the aesthetics and practical decisions that will shape the final product.

3) Develop a greater understanding of this project's place in the context of Humboldt and the work of A Bolder Humboldt. What are its services? Who are its patrons? When and how does it get used? How does it relate to the other work happening in the Bailey, on the square, and elsewhere around Humboldt? What is its message to locals, to potential visitors to Humboldt? What is its contribution to the social, cultural and economic landscape in town, and to the hospitality industry at large?

For the remainder of this blog, I'll primarily be documenting my journey at answering these questions, one specific issue at a time. I hope you’ll join me.

Thoughts? Email josh@abolderhumboldt.com, or join the discussion on Facebook.