The Crescent...
It started off as a dream larger than life. There were two old buildings in our downtown that were in need of some TLC. And there was a man who had lived the dream. One day that man - Jeff - walked into a cozy little shop, a shop he knew fairly well, and shared his story. Jeff is from a community not much different from ours, a community that was in need of a change, a need of something "new" amongst the "old". Jeff's dream was to entertain the masses in a way that locally they could not be entertained... and he opened his dream, and it was a grand success!
Jeff asked Jeanne, the owner of the shop, "This town has some great old buildings, are there any for sale?". And that is where the Crescent story begins...
Jeanne walked him a few doors down from her shop and showed him the gem in the rough. The Sears Building and the Crescent Cafe. Both were old community fixtures that over time had become less of a place to go, and more of a place to remember. The buildings had many unsuccessful turns in the past decade and now they were empty. So Jeff asked how we could buy them and turn them into something grand for the community. Luckily for us, Jeanne is not only passionate about things she believes in, but she is also relentless about them. And she was not going to let this dream pass us by!
She told a friend, who told a friend, and that person told a few others, and the next thing we knew we were having "kitchen table" meetings almost nightly trying to figure out how to make this work....
... how much money did we have to raise to buy the buildings?
...who would buy them?
...could we? ...could Jeff?
...how would the community receive the club if an "outsider" owned it?
...and then what?
So we put our heads together and created a committe called "The Crescent Project". For the last months of 2006 we talked to everyone we knew, everyone who may be interested in helping us fund this idea. Everyone who may have an interest in the project. When we realized that "if we build it, they will come", we tried hard to raise enough money in "memberships" to buy the buildings ourselves. We came close... We raised over $30K - only $15K to go before we could make the offer! But that last little bit was hard to come by. We had enough interest, but not enough commitment. So we started to give up on our dream...
Then our knight came to town on his white steed and bought the buildings! See, while we were raising money, a man named Marv was making offers for his own business. BUT, he only wanted the Sears Building - and we could have the Crescent (for rent that is!). How cool is that? We had to scale down our plans, but you know what, that was ok! We could always move to a larger space when the success overwhelmed the size of the space.
So we built it ...
