GREENSBORO - The old, abandoned pool hall has come back to life.
In the open kitchen up front, pie chefs Dan Gavin and Breanne Kostyk slice the fruit and roll the dough for a peach cobbler.
One of the front doors swings open, and a couple of out-of-towners, who've heard about the place but never been here, drop in on their way to a funeral.
"We want to try your pie," Amanda McCracken says. "I don't know what flavor you have, but I hear it's real good."
In town from Tuscaloosa, McCracken and her husband, William, decide on a slice of the Oreo pie for her and lemon icebox for him. They take their plates and sit down at the community dining table.
Meanwhile, in the back of the building, separated by a moveable wall made from salvaged wood, graphic designers Amanda Buck, Megan Deal and Robin Mooty work creating a Web site for the Hale County Humane Society and designing a new logo for the City of Northport, among their other projects.
Welcome to PieLab, an experimental pie shop and design studio where young, fresh-out-of-college visionaries have come to explore the wonderfully innocent and wildly imaginative notion that the best way to get folks in this small Black Belt town together -- and, perhaps, do something good for the community -- is to invite them inside, feed them pie and strike up a conversation.
Or, as they say in PieLab speak:
"Pie + Conversation = Ideas / Ideas + Design = Positive Change."
They have come here from Cleveland and Detroit, from Wilkes-Barre, Pa., and Tolland, Conn. -- with degrees from such schools as the College for Creative Studies, the Pratt Institute and Ohio State University -- to put their idealistic theory to practical use.
They must be doing something right.
Two weeks ago, the James Beard Foundation named PieLab one of its three finalists for outstanding restaurant design, which recognizes "the best restaurant design or renovation in North America" since 2007. The winner will be announced May 3 in New York City.
"We're all a little shocked," Buck, a graphic designer and novice pie-maker from Cleveland, says. "It's a space that sort of came together with what we had, just what we could find, and we sort of figured it out as we went. We had a goal in mind but really no plan."
The seeds for PieLab were planted on March 14 of last year -- on Pi Day, which commemorates the mathematical constant pi, or 3.14 -- at a design workshop session in Belfast, Maine, hosted by a group called Project M.
Modeled after Auburn University's Rural Studio architectural project, Project M is the brainchild of San Francisco designer John Bielenberg, who was inspired after hearing Rural Studio founder Samuel Mockbee speak about 10 years ago.
A "design-for-good movement," Project M has taken up such causes as designing waterproof books for a rainforest preserve in Costa Rica to distributing supplies to designers displaced by Hurricane Katrina.
Three years ago, on a previous mission to Greensboro, Project M's Bielenberg and his students raised about $40,000 to help residents without access to clean drinking water get connected to the city's water supply.
And last year, to celebrate Pi Day, the Project M designers served pie at a party they called Free Pie.
"We wanted to spread a little joy with pie because everyone loves pie," Buck recalls. "We served the pie on ceramic plates, and that created instant community. People were forced to stick around and talk to each other, and not take their pie and run. It was really successful."
So successful, in fact, that the designers decided to put it to the real test in the Hale County seat of Greensboro, a town of about 2,700 where many of the downtown stores sit vacant and more than a third of the residents live below the poverty level.
After they began arriving here last May and June, though, the enthusiastic designers had to keep reminding themselves not to try to save the world that first week.
"Slow and steady, that's the way Greensboro works," Deal, who moved here from Detroit, says. "You can't just come in and say, 'I'm going to do this and it's going to be awesome.'"
Not long after the designers opened their "pop-up," or temporary, pie shop at a house on Whelan Street, their excitement began to catch on.
"I saw people bringing in their fresh blueberries and fresh strawberries and fresh figs and fresh peaches," Greensboro resident Pam Dorr says. "They wanted to have their produce made into pies. So that was really nice to see that kind of connection happening."
Dorr, who moved to Greensboro from San Francisco six years ago, runs the Hale Empowerment & Revitalization Organization, or HERO for short, which helps poor families in the five-county area find affordable housing. Since 2006, HERO has built 72 homes, she says.
Dorr and HERO also helped PieLab find its current location at 1317 Main Street, transforming a dilapidated building with rotting floor joists and a collapsing back wall into a hip and functional space with exposed brick and shiny pine floors.
Like bargain hunters, the PieLab folks outfitted the kitchen with an old stove top they rescued from a junk pile, a double-wide industrial refrigerator that they got at a McDonald's garage sale, and second-hand stainless-steel tables and wire shelves they bought for $40 from the Perry County school board.
"It just came together so naturally because you're just using whatever you have that's free," Dorr says. "Everybody in the community donated something."
The designers opened for business in their new location this past November, and sell enough pie to cover their rent.
Kostyk, who grew up in Connecticut baking cookies with her mother, admits that, like most of her fellow PieLabbers, she'd never made a pie until about a year ago.
Now, though, she cooks eight or nine pies a day -- from apple crunch to blueberry-oatmeal to coconut custard -- and she's leaning more toward a career in the culinary arts instead of graphic design.
PieLab is open for pie, coffee and a light lunch Mondays through Saturdays, and in the evenings, it has become a gathering spot for garden-club meetings, open-mic nights and ballroom dance classes.
"The next big thing for us is a yoga class," Dorr says.
Although the PieLab designers have been here less than a year, Greensboro is already starting to feel like home to them.
They attend Bible study and tutor students at Greensboro Elementary School, hang out at downtown loft parties and go rafting at Perry Lakes Park in nearby Marion.
Mooty, who grew up in Auburn and graduated from Auburn University a little more than a year ago, is the one PieLab member who's not that far from home.
But she is just as charmed by the small-town life as her big-city friends from the North.
"You really live here, and you really meet people here," Mooty says. "They are no longer just subjects for your projects. It's a real town. You have real relationships. You garden with them. You knit with them."
As part of their mission to leave an impact on the community, the PieLab designers also are working with area participants in the YouthBuild program develop a business plan to market locally produced pecan products. YouthBuild helps low-income young people earn their high school GEDs while learning job skills.
"They are going to make pecan brittle and pecan butter," Buck says. "This is the YouthBuild students' idea to utilize a local resource to create a sustainable, profitable business."
However, because all of the PieLab designers are either here on grants or as AmeriCorps VISTA members, their time in Greensboro is almost done. Some may stick around, but most, if not all, will be gone by the end of the summer, Buck says.
They wonder about what will become of PieLab after they're gone, and hope a new crew will come along to continue what they started.
"I would just hate to leave and it crumble and the building become an empty shell again," Buck says. "I just hope it lives on in some form. That's the goal now."
Until then, though, they still have plenty of pie to go around.
A visit to PieLab in photos:
| The PieLab in Greensboro, Ala. |