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A Public House Revival

by Stephanie Rhys

Situated in Central Massachusetts, Prudence is getting its long awaited due. The town was incorporated in the 17^th century in the fertile Nashaway River Valley. It was an ideal place to set up apple and pear orchards and the stills that turned those early bountiful harvests into potable spirits that could be stored and transported to ever shifting American frontiers. The town’s real heyday coincided with the Civil War. Lowell provided cloth for uniforms and encampments. Brockton supplied the Union lines with shoes. Prudence provided each with the leather they needed to drive large industrial belts and produce countless boot uppers. They’d all stolen technology from across the pond and would go on to be replaced by cheaper production sites. First in the American South and today in Asia. Aside from brief upticks in production during the World Wars, Prudence was in decline for the entire 20^th century.

In fact, Prudence’s population is expected to show growth in the next census for the first time in over four decades. Only recently has it become a popular commuter town, linking tech and biotech centers in Western Mass, Central Mass, and greater Boston, by light rail of all things. Sitting ahead of the curve on the tracks is Elliot McRae and his hospitable old school New England establishment The Black Goat Tavern. McRae purchased the business from its previous owner in 1995. At the time it was little more than a room with a liquor license and would not reopen until Fall of 1996 with McRae as the new proprietor. When the Commonwealth Transit Authority announced the extension of commuter service into Central Massachusetts and named Prudence as a potential station, McRae bet on his hometown and reinvested heavily in the business.

The Challenge

The bartender at the time, Maya Francis, was enrolled in Plantation’s continuing education correspondence courses. Through her, McRae learned about Plantation’s pioneering commitment to green building techniques and design. More specifically, he was interested in integrating recycled building materials from Prudence’s then decrepit downtown area. The reclamation approach would save part of the town’s history and part of McRae’s budget, since the Prudence Council approved a slew of demolition projects to clear parking spaces for the new passenger platform. In 2003, he contacted Dr. Mackenzie Freedan and emeritus professor of universal design Dr. Ronald Blove using email and office addresses he found in Francis’ course catalog.

McRae proposed a design contest for The Black Goat Tavern’s renovation project. With Freedan and Blove’s input, they settled on three guiding principles:

• Reclaimed materials must be incorporated into structural and ornamental elements wherever possible;
• The Black Goat must remain an inclusive, community driven space;
• The contest must be open to all.

This meant teams of undergraduates would be competing with faculty and to everyone’s surprise, distinguished alumni. The only prize on offer for the winning design were mugs fixed permanently behind the bar with the winners’ names emblazoned on them. Perhaps more enticing, a free pint to fill that mug each time they visited. Thanks to the promise of free beer for life, undergraduate participation was almost one hundred percent. But the freedom and challenge of the contest motivated more senior members in the Plantation School and its greater community to also become involved in large numbers. Even well-established firms looked to leverage the pro bono work for a designated public innovation zone into beneficial tax breaks. Ultimately, most participated because it was the type of work that drew them to the field in the first place and what brought them to Plantation- that killer mix of tradition and innovation.

A Winning Combination

Giliberto Diaz, class of 2007, was a first-year student in Plantation’s School of Architecture. A certified and practicing engineer in his native Cuba, Diaz was always closer in age and experience to his course instructors than his fellow students. According to Diaz, “the first and second years here after getting asylum in la Yuma [the United States] were the most difficult.” Aside from missing home and having no way to return, “it was unbearably cold for me in New England for like seven or eight months out of the year. I couldn’t even afford to escape to Miami. Nothing was remote back then, so I found myself stuck here.”

What kept Diaz going during that difficult period were the small victories and his creative spirit. As his academic English improved, he was able to pass certification exams and even started to receive course credits for work he completed in Cuba. The contest was a “huge boost” that gave him the opportunity to “show everyone I more than belonged.” Diaz insists that his involvement “accelerated my career and made my name in the US more than any course credits or even degree ever could.”

Joining Diaz were two other international students, Trinh-Vo Nguyen from the Class of 2007 and Kaimo Parn, Class of 2005. The three sat close to each other in Dr. Randolf Collins’ Environmental Design course and formed a tight working unit early in the semester. “We were all working on our conversational English,” Parn said, “but the chief way we communicated with one another was through pictures. That was where our common understanding came from. By the time this contest [was] announced, we already knew how to work with one another as a team.” Of Vo-Nguyen, Diaz claimed “she has the best hand I’ve ever seen. You can make a couple gestures and in seconds, she has it all sketched out.” Parn agreed. “I still haven’t worked with anyone like her. There is only one Trinh. She can trace the image from your mind onto paper, from the imagination out into reality. I don’t know anyone else who can do that.”

Client Satisfaction

“In Cuba, every project requires recycled materials,” said Diaz. An island in both the literal and figurative sense since Fidel Castro’s Communist revolutionaries replaced Fulgencio Batista as the head of state in 1958, Cuba has become more and more isolated since the Soviet Union’s collapse. New supplies, building materials, and techniques usually do not find a way into Cuba due to the US led embargo. For Diaz, this meant “you build with what you already have on hand. You build and you maintain and you redesign and rebuild. That’s how we survive in Cuba.” What had once been a significant deficit in his native country was now a considerable advantage.

“It was clear from the first time I met them that they were the ones,” said Black Goat owner Elliot McRae. “They just got it. And when you talked to them and floated ideas about using this stained glass from the old union hall, or the columns that support the solar panels that cover the patio out back- we took those for free from a decrepit, unoccupied house off of Linden Ave. It’s a couple blocks away from the bar, but I remembered those columns from when I walked to school as a kid. Everyone else would push against [these] ideas and tell me they’d use recycled concrete or something that wouldn’t reveal itself as recycled material. When you talked with them, they’d take it seriously and get to drawing right away.”

“He was the perfect client for us at that time,” said Parn. “He didn’t want to hear anyone’s stories. He wanted to see images and those, through Trinh we could produce. I could manage the decorative elements. Gil made sure everything was technically sound and safe. Trinh made it all real for the client. It was a tremendous experience for me. I’ve been privileged to work on projects with much greater scope since then, but few were as satisfying as the contest.”

The Final Design

“That’s why they stood out to me as the strongest candidates from the jump,” said McRae. “Other groups had people with very impressive resumes, but they were submitting reputations not designs. They were probably too busy to commit to a little renovation project. DPV-N, they were the real deal. These guys drew everything out in painstaking detail. I was still running the bar day to day and looking after my sister’s kids at times. I didn’t have the time to read these lengthy proposals full of jargon that I was never going to understand anyways. My guys had the drawings. You could see with your own two eyes that we shared a common vision for The Goat. So, yeah, I was pulling for them one-hundred percent and everybody knew it.”

“I was all nervous,” admitted Parn. “Luckily, the owner poured pints for us without anyone asking. I can barely remember because of it, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t stop until he thought we were relaxed enough to present!” Diaz agreed. “After the six unsuccessful attempts to get to Florida, that Q and A with Dr. Freedan and Dr. Blove- very, very anxious. It was tough. The toughest thing I’d done. Both of them wrote the textbooks everyone uses and now you’re sitting in front of them at a bar trying to justify your work. It was very tough.”

“I thought they did amazing,” said McRae. “When their profs questioned the different finalists, they did not hold back. They really grilled them. Ultimately it was my investment and I thought I was hypercritical, but those two hammered them with questions. Unlike the other groups, they didn’t fold. They had all the right answers. And I’m very grateful for that. This place would not exist as it is today-the way I think it should-without the contributions DPV-N made to it.”

The Black Goat Tavern Today

Last month I had the pleasure of travelling to a sustainability conference held in Amherst. On my way there, I decided to take a look at the Black Goat Tavern for myself. It was a warm and sunny early Fall afternoon. The public house sits on a corner lot where Wolfe and Main, Prudence’s major thoroughfares, join up. Outside looking in is almost as appealing as inside looking out. The first-floor exterior is wood painted a black so dark it shines and reflects almost like an obsidian mirror. Suspended above the large night stained and brass riveted oak door is the tavern’s familiar, a goat in wrought iron relief that projects out from the second story, also painted in sparkling black. Underneath the pub’s mascot is its title, scrolled in large gold letters that curve with the corner, hugging the building in its own name. There is one floor above. It is cream colored brick with vertical red brick accents. There are three windows facing Main Street, two facing Wolfe, and one that floats at the asymmetrical bend above the metal goat. They are somehow identical in appearance upon first glance for the observer, but somewhat incongruent in shape when considered more carefully. Each one is flanked from either side by dark orange red shutters.

The roof sits above it all, an undisturbed bubble of dark gray slate. Underneath my sightline is the basement, where all the vital organs are hidden away to better dispense life into the pub without interruption. Much of the cost cutting that was encouraged during the contest was to free up capital for the real ale cask draught system installed by UK tap specialists Croven Mall. Today, local microbreweries produce specialized batches strictly for the Black Goat. It is still one of the few places in New England with the capacity to serve real ale. This means the tipple ages in its container and does not require the addition of carbon dioxide or nitrogen to pull through the first-floor bar taps. This in turn means that a pint at the Goat truly is something special. Everyone seems to know it. As they should.

Even though it was a Tuesday, the place was packed. Leaf peeping families and casual business meetings filled the dining area. Locals occupied most of the bar. There were also plenty of twentysomethings looking to secure aesthetically pleasing shots of food and drink for social media clout on the sunlit patio. They sat under a large overhang supported by two neoclassical columns that extend up twenty feet that were reclaimed from the abandoned leatherworker’s guild. On the southward facing roof is an array of ultra slim solar panels that replaced the original installation this Spring. The panels supply all the power used by the owner’s upstairs apartment. A chessboard of black and white tiles sits underneath. They were bought for less than a hundred dollars from a barbershop that moved out of the downtown area.

Back inside, you notice the all the light. There’s natural light streaming in through geometric stained glass that had decorated vacant homes for years before being installed at each end of the bar. The best of the bunch is a faded purple, green, and blue diamond lattice panel. It curves with the street because they were repurposed from the witch’s hat turret that once crowned Prudence leather magnate and rail titan Kenilworth Americus Bacon’s 19^th century mansion. Like many of the town’s historic homes, the rest of the Bacon property was razed and is now the very square site of gleaming multistory commuter condos. The Goat was also renovated before the Williamsburg dark wood trim and dim came to dominate hospitality. There is wood and leather everywhere, as one would expect in Prudence, but the palette ranges from brilliant blonde tables to milk chocolate booths that melt into the relaxed diners lucky enough to occupy them. The floors are a darker oak and original to the Goat. They were refurbished and re-laid after the other renovations had been completed and serve to balance, not diminish all the natural light flowing through the barroom.

Perhaps most notable from a critical point of view is what’s absent. Unlike other bars and pubs, there is no discernible theme other than Prudence itself. Nothing obscures or busies the walls. There are only three things pinned up behind the bar itself. Two pictures of high school basketball teams from different eras and a faded Red Sox pennant. Like the rest of the Goat, it leaves the patrons to themselves. Unrushed by visual clutter, they can fully savor the food, drink, and each other’s company.

In short, it is a proper public house. Even if its publican is too modest to bring up the dozens of service awards and accolades for food and beverage the Goat has secured since reopening in 2004. “It’s gone far better than according to plan,” said McRae. Yes. Yes, it has.

Giliberto Diaz is now a full partner in the West Coast commercial firm Berry, McDonald, and Diaz. His work can be spotted throughout San Jose and Santa Clara. Kaimo Parn returned to Europe and co-founded a pioneering nongovernmental organization that researches and adapts robotics for use in construction. Trinh Vo-Nguyen has since become synonymous with monumental architecture. Among other massive projects, including three museums, she saw through the acclaimed Halburtsen Library and Rare Book Archives in Montevideo from start to finish. All three are major donors to the Plantation School of Design.