{"id":4840,"date":"2019-09-19T15:41:49","date_gmt":"2019-09-19T15:41:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/?p=4840"},"modified":"2023-05-24T17:56:13","modified_gmt":"2023-05-24T17:56:13","slug":"mercantile-37-making-the-unexpected","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/2019\/09\/19\/mercantile-37-making-the-unexpected\/","title":{"rendered":"Mercantile 37: Making the Unexpected"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Nick Roudebush \u201908 was a boy he told his father, \u201cI\u2019m not going to do what you do for a living.\u201d Now they\u2019re working together.<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Oscar Wilde wrote: \u201cLife imitates art far more often than art imitates life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nick Roudebush gets that.<\/p>\n

In 2011 he was making pottery in a wood-fired kiln, finishing his MFA at Notre Dame, and exploring the virtues of wabi sabi, the Zen Buddhist notion that sees beauty in the imperfect, even in the old and broken, and finds profound teachings in the simple, quiet, and humble facets of life.<\/p>\n

\u201cEmptiness is full of potential, and ugliness becomes beauty,\u201d he told WM<\/em> then, explaining the seemingly random process through which the koge bottles and pots he made would \u201creveal themselves\u201d through unexpected results.<\/p>\n

Eight years later he\u2019s standing on a mottled concrete floor in Mercantile 37, the abandoned truck stop on Highway 37 near Atlanta, Indiana, that Nick and his father, J.R., have resurrected, redesigned, and expanded into a caf\u00e9 and artisan showroom for 50-plus makers from central Indiana.<\/p>\n

And the conversation sounds familiar.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t want to have a design plan, but we had to buy one so an architect could sign off on it for our permits,\u201d says Nick. \u201cWe didn\u2019t look at it once.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cBoth of us had the same vision,\u201d says J.R., who retired last year from a career in the consumer foods industry. \u201cEvery morning we\u2019d have an artists\u2019 conversation. We\u2019d see things, we\u2019d try things. That vision played out day by day.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe building would speak to us,\u201d says Nick. \u201cWe\u2019d go back and forth; it was never like we thought it would be.\u201d<\/p>\n

He points to the floor.<\/p>\n

\u201cWabi sabi<\/em> celebrates imperfections,\u201d says Nick. \u201cLike this concrete\u2014we didn\u2019t think much of it, but a guy said he could grind it down, he did that, and we liked it.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Mercantile 37 was built much the same way as many of the artful products created by Nick, J.R., and other local artisans who sell their work there.<\/p>\n

And it\u2019s thriving.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

It wasn\u2019t quite<\/strong> that easy.<\/p>\n

\u201cI used to drive by this place every day when I was working at the farm,\u201d Nick recalls. It was late 2017 and he was an adjunct professor of ceramics at Indiana Wesleyan and working part time on the farm that belonged the family of his wife, Emma.<\/p>\n

\u201cI decided that we were either going to have to make farming my everyday career, or spend more time making things. Emma is pretty conservative financially; I was surprised when she said, \u2018Let\u2019s find a way to make things.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

About the same time, J.R.\u2019s retirement hobby of building and selling industrial\/farmstead-style light fixtures was booming into a burgeoning business, and he needed more space. That got Nick thinking: \u201cOne day, instead of turning for home, I pulled in and sat here and called my dad and said, \u2018Let\u2019s look at this place.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

This place was a mess\u2014but with history. Built in the 1940s by Cecil Scott and his wife (Emma\u2019s great aunt and uncle), Scotty\u2019s Inn became a favorite stop for truckers, local farmers, and travelers. It changed hands, re-opened as Wheeler\u2019s Restaurant in the 1970s, and was well-known for its pancakes and biscuits and gravy until it shut down in the late 1990s. It had been abandoned nearly 20 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cWord on the street was that something could be done here,\u201d says Nick. His father wasn\u2019t so sure.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople said there were infrastructure issues, that you\u2019d never get a septic system to work,\u201d says J.R. \u201cI dragged my feet for a year\u2014it was way more money than I wanted to spend. But Nick persisted.\u201d<\/p>\n

They had to cancel closing on the building three times because their drainage plans had not been approved. For Nick, the local government bureaucracy proved more maddening than any obstacle in the building itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut once we committed, we figured we\u2019d find a way to get it done,\u201d says J.R.<\/p>\n

Father and son had worked on small projects before, but nothing like this.<\/p>\n

\u201cMostly handyman stuff.\u201d J.R. laughs. \u201cNick was always handier than me, which made me mad.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of the early work on the building was demolition, and one day in particular shed new light on the project. At one of those morning \u201cartists\u2019 conversations,\u201d Nick and J.R. decided to rip out a section of the second floor.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019d been a fire there, the floor was bad, and we wondered what it might look like opened up,\u201d says J.R. \u201cWhen that floor came out and the walls were still standing\u2014that was an eventful day!\u201d<\/p>\n

Today that opening is the airy, light-filled entrance to the showroom, the signature space of the building.<\/p>\n

Not every decision worked out so splendidly, and there were long days, cold, late nights, and lot of sweat during the nearly nine months it took Nick and J.R. to give shape to their vision.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou should hear them, the way they jab, the way they talk to each other, the way they work things out,\u201d says Wabash Professor Emeritus of Art Doug Calisch, one of several friends who pitched in on project. \u201cDefinitely a father and son!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was something, really something, working together like that every day.\u201d J.R. smiles.<\/p>\n

Opening day was something else. Saturday, September 29, 2018, saw crowds larger than either Nick or his father had imagined. The parking lot and surrounding fields were full of the cars of people curious see the new caf\u00e9 and showroom.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a line at the door of the caf\u00e9 when we opened,\u201d Nick recalls. \u201cThey just kept coming, and there was steady strong business through Christmas.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d say about 1,500 people came through the doors that day\u2014we ran out of food,\u201d says J.R. \u201cI thought it would go well, but not that well.\u201d<\/p>\n

J.R. says Mercantile 37<\/strong> has exceeded his financial expectations. The number of artisans selling at Mercantile 37 has increased from 23 to 50.<\/p>\n

\u2018What\u2019s really fun for me is seeing the makers in the building,\u201d says J.R. \u201cA lot of them are young\u2014it\u2019s cool to see their skill and their passion for what they do.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s rewarding to provide a space like this for them,\u201d says Nick. His own work has shifted from \u201cmaking art for the gallery to making products for people.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to design things for people to use that are artful and well-thought-out.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s become his criteria for Mercantile 37’s collective of local makers.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not an antique store, we\u2019re not an art gallery. Everyone has slightly different ideas about the farmhouse aesthetic, and I\u2019m becoming more open to other handmade objects that weren\u2019t in my original vision. But it\u2019s got to be a quality item.\u201d<\/p>\n

J.R. saysgreeting and serving customers at Mercantile 37 takes him back to his youth.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy dad owned a grocery store, and I worked with him, and Nick is working with me now. It doesn\u2019t feel like a job.<\/p>\n

\u201cI love seeing Nick do what he always wanted to do.\u201d<\/p>\n

Much of what Nick wants to do is in the woodshop that takes up about a quarter of the building\u2019s first floor. Visitors can watch through windows as tables and other pieces are made.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people who come here say, \u2018Thank you for bringing this thing to life,\u201d says Nick. \u201cThis building has done a lot for us.\u201d<\/p>\n

His four-year-old son Everett likes to clean up the shop after his dad is done.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo we have three generations in here.\u201d Nick smiles. To be working with his dad is as much a happy accident as any piece of art Nick ever created.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was a kid I told my father, \u2018I\u2019m not going to do what you do.\u2019 He encouraged me to find my own path, and I held on to that at Wabash and ever since. Now here we are working together, and in a building that was part of Emma\u2019s family too.<\/p>\n

\u201cI hope this can become something I can hand down to my kids, though I\u2019m not going to push them one way or the other.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I\u2019m definitely going to encourage them to make things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Maker and Mentor<\/h3>\n

Professor of Art Emeritus Doug Calisch was re-purposing and making long before today\u2019s re-purposers and makers were born. He was Nick Roudebush\u2019s teacher, helped with some of the renovation of Mercantile 37, and was one of its first artists.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was at Wabash and in his studio, I could see that he was making art and things for the gallery, yes, but he was also making things for people,\u201d says Roudebush. \u201cHe changed my life.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn the academy, anything that was useful got demoted from the ranks of high arts; that\u2019s been overcome in the last 10 years or so, but that was the thinking for a long time.<\/p>\n

\u201cDoug knew better, he was ahead of that.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When Nick Roudebush \u201908 was a boy he told his father, \u201cI\u2019m not going to do what you do for a living.\u201d Now they\u2019re working together. Oscar Wilde wrote: \u201cLife imitates art […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":4847,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-featured-videos","category-features","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"w_featured_image_url":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2019\/09\/nick-horiz-1-1024x683.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4840","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4840"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4840\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4853,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4840\/revisions\/4853"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4847"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.wabash.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}