When Pallookaville Fine Foods opened on Halloween 2013, ecstatic Avondale Estates officials were convinced they’d finally secured a cornerstone for downtown business. This was almost a decade after the city nearly realized a 375,000-square-foot mixed-use development on North Avondale Road. But that project dissipated with recession, developer bankruptcy and considerable civic opposition.
Pallookaville practically defied description, with its 1960s TV science fiction décor and gourmet corn dogs housed within a funky, century-old brick building. It was also a symbol of economic resuscitation, of changing times and a government proclaiming that its doors were wide open for development.
But on Nov. 12, a scant four years later, Pallookaville closed with barely a whimper. By the next day its windows were covered in brown paper.
The reasons are multi-faceted, although founder and original owner Jim Stacy admitted to one two days after closing.
“I was terrible at owning a restaurant,” Stacy texted to the AJC. “I’m great at the concepts and the ideas and execution, but learned the massively hard way that I’m bad at being an owner.”
In the larger picture, however, little has changed on the surface in Avondale Estates since Pallookaville’s christening.
Much of the three-quarter mile stretch on North Avondale Road, from Sams Crossing to Pallookaville’s front door on North Clarendon Avenue remains undeveloped, underdeveloped or vacant. Traffic rushes past heavy and fast, and sidewalks are cracked, treacherous or nonexistent.
There is some transformation on the horizon though, as it turns out, too late for Pallookaville.
In March, ground was broken for Avondale Estates’ first modern mixed-use development, a four-story project to include 197 apartments and 8,000 square feet of retail or restaurant space. The city sees this three-acre tract as the official western gateway.
About 200 yards west, in Decatur, is an even bigger development with a planned 470 apartments and 22,000 square feet of retail or restaurant space. Both are expected to open next fall.
The city’s also been given the go-ahead by the Georgia Department of Transportation to create a design plan for narrowing North Avondale Road, a state highway, from five to three lanes. This would also include wider sidewalks, safer intersection crossings, bike lanes, green infrastructure and would make Avondale Estates’ business district far more accessible.
But construction on such a project — GDOT would have to approve the final plan — wouldn’t start until Feb. 2021, at the earliest.
In late 2015 the city began giving its Downtown Development Authority more teeth. With an $180,000 budget this year the city, in the words of Mayor Jonathan Elmore, is “paying [the DDA] for services” such as marketing and branding, which Avondale has never done consistently. In April the DDA also hired David Burt as a part-time economic development consultant, which the city’s never had.
“David’s still getting his feet wet,” DDA chairman Sam Collier said recently. “But a lot of what he’ll be doing is recruiting businesses, scouting business and compiling a roster of businesses with a good plan and model that’s potentially right for Avondale. He’ll also stay in touch with our current businesses and how they’re faring.
“What we want,” Collier added, “are small, locally-owned businesses, which gives us more character.”
Jim Stacy had plenty of that. But with a multi-faceted career including, among others, acting and diverse television work, he sold Pallookaville in early 2016 to restaurateurs James Maggard and Jason Hylton.
When reached recently Maggard said Pallookaville was seldom able to draw from outside the city’s one square mile.
“Part of the problem,” Maggard said, “is we couldn’t figure out how to do somebody else’s concept. I still love the space and we’re going to sit on it for a while. We may keep it and do something different or, more than likely, we’ll hand it off to somebody else. I really feel this can be a neighborhood bar or sports bar-type place.”
Pallookaville concept hard to maintain without original visionary
The 2013 opening of the gourmet corn dog restaurant Pallookaville Fine Foods in downtown Avondale Estates created an intriguing marriage between city and entrepreneur.
In some respects Avondale Estates was frozen in time, it’s most powerful symbol a quarter-mile long hedge separating downtown business district from residential neighborhoods. It’s lake and park had signs warning non-Avondale residents to keep out.
Along comes Pallookaville founder Jim Stacy, a former punk rock musician turned television personality, chef, actor and corndog virtuoso among others. Heavily tattooed, standing 6-6 with a sprawling untamable red beard, Stacy stood out at city commission meetings. He also breathed instant electricity into a city that needed it.
During a 2016 interview with the AJC Stacy gave this partial description of himself: “I am an illustrator of children’s books of some renown. I’m a cook of some renown and a bartender of some renown.
“I play a little drums, I’m a pretty good session and live harmonica player. I own every Looney Tune cartoon and every Popeye cartoon that isn’t utterly racist. I don’t own any Disney stuff.”
He’s also played Darth Vader in an all-Star Wars rock band, he’s been Uncle Laffo the Clown and he’s played in an all-Santa band called “Yule Log.”
The name “Pallookaville” comes from the Polish word “palooka”— Stacy can spend a half hour explaining why he added the extra “l”—which means a washed up, hack boxer. Stacy, not surprisingly, loves 1970s heavyweight boxing.
Perhaps it was inevitable that someone of such diverse pursuits wasn’t suited to the daily grind of restaurant ownership.
In early 2016 Stacy moved into one of Avondale Estates original 10 houses inside the hedges. But even while touting Avondale’s potential as “a great artisan and food community,” he sold Pallookaville to restaurateurs James Maggard and Jason Hylton.
The restaurant closed for two months, likely signaling its death knell. Reopening in March 2016, Maggard says now they couldn’t figure out how to make Stacy’s quirky concept work. One Decatur restaurant owner remarked that Pallookaville’s corndog-and-carnival atmosphere was “fascinating and like no other restaurant. But nobody can eat corndogs on a regular basis.”
Then last March one employee stabbed another, reportedly 11 times with a butcher knife, an incident receiving its share of publicity. Maggard said the restaurant raised money for the victim’s hospital bills and eventually he returned to his job as a dishwasher.
But in the end Pallookaville wasn’t, in Maggard’s words, “making any money.” He still believes in the space, he said, and last week one city official expressed hope a new restaurant may open as soon as January.
Despite everything Stacy said recently, if he had it to do over again, he’d change little.
“It was beautiful when it was rocking,” he said. “That is and will be the best thing I ever take away from this adventure. I worked, loved, laughed, cried and dreamed incredible stuff with some great folks and stellar customers. I can’t really ask for more or different.”
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