Darryl Settles's Corner Bar & Kitchen finds a landing pad

Darryl Settles's latest venture, Darryl's Corner Bar & Kitchen, has opened on the border between Lower Roxbury and the South End. This is the location of the long-time Boston landmark restaurant, Bob the Chef's, and, most recently, of the Stork Club.

Here is how Mr. Settles describes the core concept behind his establishment: "When we first started working on the Darryl’s Corner Bar & Kitchen concept we knew we wanted to be a Great Bar with a great kitchen as opposed to a Great Restaurant with a great bar. The distinction is important."

In anchoring his establishment around a bar, rather than a restaurant, Mr. Settles asserts that the "Corner Bar has always been an important part of our community, whether as a meeting place for revolutionaries or respite for the working man."

With the gentrification of the South End and Northeastern's salient into Lower Roxbury, it seems revolutionaries are scarce on the ground. (Lucy Parsons, anyone?) With the unemployment rate nearing Great Depression levels in Roxbury, the class of working men and women is getting much smaller, too. Perhaps students and the white collar class will make up for the missing proletariat and revolutionaries.

Despite the conceptual emphasis on the drinks, Darryl's Corner Bar & Kitchen does not neglect the kitchen. Here is a three-page pdf of the menu (sans prices).

Mr. Settles has been working his publicity machinery well. A google search for the bar's name yields a solid 50 hits of press announcements and reviews. The Bay State Banner has published a feature article.

That corner of Columbus Avenue and Northampton Street ("the intersection of friends, food, and music") is a quick 7 minute bicycle ride and a brisk 20 minute walk from Mr. Settles's first choice of location for his bar and restaurant, so residents of Fort Hill have yet another convenient choice for drinks and dinner.

A little more than six months ago, Mr. Settles investigated 85 Centre Street on Fort Hill as a possible location for his bar and restaurant.

Iseut via UniversalHub brought Mr. Settles's Fort Hill designs to our attention, providing the impetus for this blog. The first twelve posts conclude with this coda. Those posts chronicle some of the kerfuffle Mr. Settles's proposal provoked on the Centre Street side of Fort Hill. It is bizarre that these posts, from a infant blog with a grand total of 40 posts, aspiring only to cover a tiny part of a middling city, consistently show up high on the first page of a google search on the words Darryl Settles.

Despite our previous opposition, we are very pleased that Mr. Settles's has found a congenial location for his bar and restaurant. We are sorry that some on Fort Hill were disappointed that that location was not at 85 Centre Street. But, we are confident that Darryl's Corner Bar & Kitchen will flourish "at the intersection of food, friends, and music." (So far, the church at 85 Centre Street has remained a reasonably quiet and considerate neighbor.)

The timing of the opening of Darryl's Corner Bar is auspicious for the jazz festival that Mr. Settles founded ten years ago, The Berklee Beantown Jazz Festival, is set to start next week on 15 September and is to run for the next ten days.

The festival is located on Columbus Avenue between Burke Street and Massachusetts Avenue, right on the front steps of Darryl's Corner Bar. [This image is owned by the Berklee College of Music.]

Got Faith? Legend's on the Hill morphs back into a church.

Mission Hill boasts the Mission Church and now Fort Hill has its own Mission Church, too.

The Fellowship Mission Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ of the Apostolic Faith, Inc. erected its new, well-lighted sign at 85 Centre Street this afternoon. They seem to be one of three churches in the metropolitan area affiliated with the Mission Church of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a diocese of the larger COOLJC.


A quick peek in the door shows a a spic 'n' span buff-colored interior with a wooden lectern already in place. So far, there were no chairs or pews, though.

This announcement comes from their Facebook wall:

Fellowship Mission Church now has an address! 85 CENTRE ST. Boston (behind Rox Comm College) Come & be blessed - Fri 8pm prayer 4 power & prosperity! Sun 11am Worship & Praise - You will leave more blessed than when you came! See you there!

85 Centre Street was the proposed location of Beehive developer, Darryl Settles's latest entrepreneurial venture, Legend's on the Hill. When neighborhood opposition grew Mr. Settles withdrew consideration of his various proposals. It seems, denied a nice profit on a commercial-land venture, the property's owner has thrown his lot in with Elder Marshall on a spiritual venture.

It has been an interesting couple of years for this lot of land, from disused building to neighborhood store to disused building to putative church to proposed bar-restaurant and back to a church, again.

As noted earlier on this blog (4th & 5th paragraphs of this post), churches are not always the best neighbors. It will be interesting to see whether Fort Hill's Mission Church will be a good neighbor, whether they will successfully evangelize the neighborhood or whether the congregation will come entirely from off the hill, and whether the residents will reminisce about the good-ole days when the building was quiet and disused.

Next posts: Got Milk?

Blowing Darryl Settles's Horn

The photograph at the left is owned by the Berklee College of Music. It depicts the Beantown Jazz Festival on Columbus Avenue, Roxbury. It is reproduced here to give one measure of Darryl Settles's undoubted success at attracting crowds to his business ventures.

By all accounts Darryl Settles is a notable entrepreneur, restaurateur, and businessman.

He took over—and made over—Bob the Chef's in a time when folk weren't that eager to think of its Northampton Street location as the fashionable South End. He had a good 17-year run with that business, before moving on to the Beehive Restaurant, which actually is located in the South End.

Ten years ago Mr. Settles produced the first Beantown Jazz Festival. Starting from an amazing 10,000 attendees in its first year, the size swelled to 80,000 attendees in 2009. He continued producing it until Berklee College of Music assumed responsibility for it seven years later. The Beehive restaurant remained a prominent sponsor in 2009.

By his own account, Mr. Settles's contributions to the Boston community are broad and extend from hunger and homelessness to minority health issues and Gay Pride. While he used to live in Roxbury and has now moved to Newton, Mr. Settles maintains his civic connection to Boston.

He claims membership on the boards of the Huntington Theatre, the Museum of Fine Arts, and the Berklee College of Music Advisory Board.

Mr. Settles was appointed to the board of the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority on 22 Feb 2008 by Governor Deval Patrick.

His restaurant business ventures are prominent enough in the Boston community that when news filtered out that someone was interested in opening a jazz bar & restaurant on Fort Hill, there was speculation about it in the foodie press (Grubb Street article 1 and 2).

Here is Mr. Settles's own take on his accomplishments at his D'Ventures Limited web site. Here is his more expansive take [20kb pdf] at the vestigial web site of Bob's Southern Bistro.

Mr. Settles has had his share of public business problems (e.g., this Globe article about a business dispute with his Beehive partners), but these are to be expected.

The entertainment publication Stuff@Night named Mr. Settles, in 2001, "One of Boston's Most Powerful Players." In 2005, 2006, and 2007 they named him as one of the "100 Players of Boston's Nightlife."

At this point the reader may be thinking, "We are all sure that Darryl Settles is a fine and successful businessman, but, What is the payoff for this post?"

The payoff for this post is not another encomium to the social and capitalist prowess of Darryl Settles. He does not need a Jonas Prang for that.

The payoff for this post is a warning.

Mr. Settles is wired fully into the Boston business community, into the Boston charitable community, into Boston and Commonwealth politics. He is a board member of the Convention Center. He served as an associate commissioner of the Metropolitan District Commission. He serves on the board of the MFA and various other cultural institutions.

Mr. Settles clearly has pull, and, no doubt he has some push, too.

What remains to be seen, however, is whether Mr. Settles has the "pull" to to push an inappropriate venture onto an unwilling neighborhood.

The next few posts will show conclusively that a jazz-bar and restaurant does not belong in the residential environs of 85 Centre Street.

Someone else's party at 85 Centre Street

An early poster on the UniversalHub comment thread said it best:

I can't blame the neighbors for not making someone else's party their priority.

Over the next several days we'll post some facts and opinions about the neighborhood surrounding 85 Centre Street and about the impact Mr. Settles's proposal would make to that neighborhood.

Suffice it to say today that it seems many have pinned their unrealized hopes and dreams for Fort Hill to Mr. Settles's business play at 85 Centre Street.

Some earnest Fort Hill voices have been heard on the subject, but the voices of those most affected by Mr. Settles's proposed change to the Centre Street status quo have not been heard.

As we pledged to Iseut on the UniversalHub comment thread we should all focus on the issues, not the personalities, as the neighborhood debates Mr. Settles's proposal and as this episode works itself out.

An Urban Amenity at 85 Centre Street

Universal Hub highlighted a blogpost written on 28 Jan 2010 by Iseut (her second post on the topic is here) about development plans for 85 Centre Street, Roxbury, by former Fort Hill resident Darryl Settles. Further information can be found littered among the posts at the google groups Highland Park Neighborhood Watch and HighlandParkBoston.

For a first post on this blog, we think it's sufficient to point to Iseut's advocacy on her blog and to our testy exchange in the comments at Universal Hub. Our four most pertinent comments are here, here, here, and here. Iseut's gracious reply is here.

It's good for all concerned to ratchet back the emotions so that all the various constituencies on the hill can work together to sustain and improve the neighborhood. Bashing fellow neighbors with our blogs is hardly the way to do this. For our part, we'll do our best to honor the soccer maxim to play the ball, not the man.

It is good as well to note the fact that the Hawthorne Area Neighborhood Association discussed the issue on 8 Feb 2010.

According to the published minutes, they voted in favor supporting Mr. Settles venture move forward, with the caveat that he must attend a meeting, facilitated by [City Councillor] Chuck Turner, with immediate abutters ... to discuss his detailed proposal, and all options for 85 Centre Street, before full community support is granted.

We'll be back with more, as the situation progress.