Life is Tip Top in WRJ
Design Observed:
Life is “Tip Top” in WRJ: The bakeries are gone but there’s plenty cooking
by Dan Mackie; photographs by Medora Hebert
The voluptuous smell of bread baking once filled the Tip Top Building in White River Junction, but now there’s a feast for another sense. Visual art is everywhere: in studios, in hallways, hanging from the high ceilings in the form of long yellow spoons.
The solid brick walls play straight man for a light comedy of color. Hallway floors are painted red, or green, or silver. Some walls are brighter than orange juice. Skylights let sunshine in to play.
Host to several baking companies from the 1880s to 1974 (ending with Ward Baking and Tip Top Bread), the Tip Top was like much of White River Junction when Matt Bucy (pictured left) and other investors bought it in 2000. The railroad boom was past, and it wasn’t certain what was coming down the tracks. In its post-bakery years the Tip Top was enlisted for grimy industrial uses, the last a motor repair operation.
Bucy, a Yale-educated architect and former engineer involved with synthesizers and digital audio, thought the Next Big Thing was high-tech. With super high-speed Internet access nearby at the Verizon switching facility, the developers thought they’d attract a mix of tech and art and media.
The dot-com boom went bust, and the new owners adjusted. Without dominant tenants, the Tip Top is a beehive full of more than 30 occupants: printers, painters, photographers, massage therapists, a family-friendly pottery studio, a restaurant, book publisher, a public access TV studio, and spaces for ballet and karate. There’s a waiting list for new tenants.
Kim Souza, owner of Revolution, a vintage clothing store just down the street, called Bucy a “flagship pioneer’’ in the village, once a crossroads for New England rail. “The first big risk taker was critical. It sparked the pace of revitalization,’’ she said. In her view Bucy made others think, “Maybe we can do something, too.’’
White River Junction, which is still described as gritty, may be finding its Next (Sort of) Big Thing in the arts. Less than 10 miles from Hanover, N.H., and Dartmouth College, it offers lower rents and no upper crust.
A small college for cartoonists has opened in White River Junction, and Northern Stage offers lively professional theater. It’s not easy street—small shops open and close and “for rent’’ signs pop up like spring flowers. The paint peels off several buildings that have been empty for years.
Bucy doesn’t mind the grittiness. “So many towns around here are dressed up for tourists to be this fantasy of what Vermont should look like,’’ he told the New York Times in a travel article.
“We want to be real. It’s easier to be real, and affordable,’’ agreed Gabriel Quirk, who has space in the old “muffin room’’ next to Bucy’s office at the Tip Top. “Gabriel Q’’ is a “fantasy technician’’ who travels with his oversized puppets to renaissance fairs and New Orleans’ Mardi Gras.
The building inspires collaboration. On the first Friday of each month, many of the artists and other tenants host open studios that draw good crowds. “There’s a cross-pollination’’ that benefits all, said Quirk.
“It’s great. It’s fabulous,’’ Gerry Cronin, studio coordinator at CATV-8, the local cable access station, said about the arts community. Northern Stage sometimes uses the cable studio for rehearsals, and the artist-tenants appear on locally produced shows.
“It’s kind of a funky space. We complement each other,’’ agreed Elaine McGuckin, manager of the Tip Top Restaurant, which has one of the corner spots in the building. The artists are regular customers and she like seeing them around. Their work even made her try harder on a signboard outside the eatery. “I know it inspired me,’’ she said.
At 45,000 square feet, the Tip Top is a substantial reminder of White River Junction’s past. Although the splashes of paint and use of metals and acrylics speak of the new, there are still touches of the old. On the back side of the building, a fading painted sign shows a young girl smelling a loaf of enriched white bread. “It’s like opening the door to a bakery,’’ it says.
That bakery door is long shut at the Tip Top, but others have opened, and they are painted in bright colors.
