The Plight of Jonesville's Rebel Market

Dan Giangreco has big ideas for the former Jonesville Market, if he can just get past these roadblocks

Story by Andrew Beam

Photos provided by Max Cohn

In Dan Giangreco’s mind, it’s the perfect scene; the protagonist is harassed by his antagonist. The situation itself could be taken right out of a movie: A story based in a quaint town where a young entrepreneur attempts to open a small business, but his evil neighbor does everything in his power to see that it doesn’t happen. The only thing about this story is that it has yet to see a resolution, and there isn’t one in the near future.

The setting of this tale is in Richmond, Vermont, just 10 minutes south of Burlington. With a population of only a little over 4,000, when something this controversial pops up, word seems to get around pretty quickly. So when the news came around that Giangreco, a 25-year-old local business owner, was trying to revive the deceased Jonesville Country Store and rename it the Long Trail Community Market (LTCM), while local businessman Isaac Cowan and Select board member Mary Houle began filing complaints against the market, publications like the Burlington Free Press and Vermont’s alternative publication, Seven Days, began to hastily take note of it.

Giangreco began leasing the former Jonesville Country store, a building with bright green floors and a vibrant pink ceiling, from owner Chip Spillane last spring. He came into the project with the idea of bringing back the general store, but with a different twist on it. “I had done pizzas at the Farmer’s Market and I enjoyed that experience,” he explains, “I kind of wanted to get back into it.” Meanwhile, Spillane had a request of his own. He wanted rooms like the deli, where meat hooks hang from the ceiling. “Originally I just wanted to put in a kitchen and open that up,” he says. “He wanted me to open up the rest of the store. I wasn’t terribly keen on the idea but I figured he’s giving me this great opportunity to use this space and kind of just do my thing, why not?”

He had a plethora of big ideas for what he wanted to do with his new store. Giangreco planned on putting his history with fine dining to use in the store, as he wanted to continue to make his pizzas for the community, in addition to getting the deli in business again. “It’s this kind of backcountry aesthetic, it’s primal kind of earthy-farmstead mixture of food,” Giangreco describes of his expertise. “It’s kind of like if I plopped out of here a long time ago and I was just forced to use the ingredient I was surrounded with. I always found that an interesting and compelling process.”

“In hindsight, had I known how vicious this guy would turn out to be. I wouldn’t have even let him in the building. So it was kind of a tough lesson learned.”

He began taking the necessary measures to properly open up the store. He began cleaning out the store and trying to figure out what exactly needed to be worked on in order to get everything in motion because little did he know, before he began leasing the place, that there was a lot of work to do. “Chip told me he was turnkey and he was ready to go,” Giangreco says of his first conversations with Spillane. “I don’t think that he had done his homework when he said it was turnkey, because it was anything but turnkey. So a lot of the decisions I made early on were under the assumption that I just needed to do a little bit of light renovation and we would be up and running again.”

Soon, after going through the store, he was learning what he could and could not do, which became somewhat disappointing to him. After learning about zoning regulations, and discovering that the place needed a well in order to have clean drinking water, he began giving up some of his plans as he went along, producing a new business model as time went on.

 “When we would give interviews, we would have all these cool ideas like I wanted to have a community center, which would literally consist of two computers, a couch, and a coffee table,” he describes. “You just can’t do that because the septic is limited, it’s suited for only a certain number of employees.” Still, he realized there were other things he could accomplish with the store, and that the store was not done yet. “My kind of operational model is this is just a hub,” he says of his idea of having a workshop series they would run. “It’s not just going to be based here at the store necessarily; it’s going to be out in the community.”

Richmond Select Board Member Erik Filkorn is in favor of having the store open up in the area, and he feels that it would be important for the businesses in Richmond. “It will mean a lot to have people shop there,” Filkorn says, “we lost a market because of the bridge closing, and it was because it was not capitalized. The store needs to meet the needs of the community.”

As he began going to work and put his plan into action, Giangreco began receiving visits from a local that he had been dutifully warned about. “The first day I showed up with keys, before meeting anyone, I had people from all ends of town say, ‘Listen, there’s this guy who owns these buildings. You want nothing to do with him. Don’t interact with him.’” Giangreco listened to the advice, but decided he would come to his own judgment of Cowan come on his terms, not from the description of others. He said he would give him, “the benefit of the doubt.”

At first Cowan was very cordial, asking about the different spaces in the building and asking what he was planning on doing with it. Giangreco first shrugged it off as sheer curiosity. Giangreco got excited as he started to list off all his different ideas and thoughts for the place. The topic of zoning issues came up, and he tried to play it cool.

“He was aware that he played out his welcome. He never came back to the store.”

“I don’t know the first thing about zoning regulations, this is not my background,” he explains. “And I said, ‘Ah, I got it covered, I’m not worried. Don’t you worry.’ It was basically just my way of saying, ‘I have no idea what the f--- I’m talking about.’”

Unbeknownst to Giangreco, Cowan was sizing up the place, and his curiosity was really just research and building resources for when he could come at Giangreco later on. “In hindsight, had I known how vicious this guy would turn out to be,” he says, “I wouldn’t have even let him in the building. So it was kind of a tough lesson learned.”

Giangreco can recall the exact turning point where his relationship with Cowan went sour. He was inside cleaning the store with his father when Cowan made another one of his visits. Except this time there were no greetings, he got right down to business. “He just started hammering me with questions like, ‘What are you doing about this, and what are you doing about this?’” he explains. When he told Cowan that was unsure and to take his questions up with Spillane, Cowan noticeably did not get the answers he was looking for. “My dad was observing this interaction and you could see his eyes getting wider and wider as this guy was hammering me with questions,” he says, “and I left and I was like, ‘That is what these people were talking about.’” This created a paradigm shift in Cowan’s trips to the store. “It was mutual,” he explains. “He was aware that he played out his welcome. He never came back to the store.”

After that, the terms of their relationship were established, and Giangreco began to see more complaints coming his way from Cowan.

The first incident came about when he applied for his beer and wine license. When the appeal went to the town select board, Houle was the only member to vote it down, allowing for the store to obtain its license. Giangreco is still confused as to why the complaint was filed in the first place, but he has felt that way about nearly all of Cowan’s complaints.

“I honestly don’t remember was the reason was,” he says, “but that’s the thing, everytime he does he cites a non-reason reason.” It was not an isolated incident, as Cowan and Houle teamed up to hold up the process a few more times.

Friends of Giangreco’s from Brooklyn had come up and painted a giant mural of a floral, underwater scene with a large green face painted in the middle. Cowan soon went to Houle, complaining that the mural was some sort of billboard and was violating town regulations. Making a pizza for his new neighbor’s, Giangreco was preparing for a dinner party. Around 9:30pm, Houle, Cowan, and others parked their cars on the front edge of the property and shined their headlights on the house. He was a little bit spooked by the situation. “It was like the f-----g Klu Klux Klan,” he exclaims, “it was ridiculous.” He soon devised a plan of how he and his friends would respond. The response was a bit of an unorthodox one. “We dressed up and got props and marched by them,” he laughs, “some of us were playing guitar, and we brought the pizza over to the neighbor’s house.”

Giangreco prevailed, as the town disagreed with the complaints filed by Cowan and Houle. What it did bring about was his first interaction with Houle. In interviews with Seven Days, Houle has been outspoken about her disdain for the shop, as she was quoted in August comparing the LTCM to a Wal-mart because of the town’s poor zoning regulations.

“Basically, she said we did things inappropriately,” he says, a bit confused, “and I’m just waiting for someone to tell me what we did inappropriately.”

When asked by phone about her involvement with the LTCM, Houle denied she has any relationship with it at all. “There is no situation with the property owned by Chip Spillane,” she replied. Soon after saying this, Houle then said, “talk to Chip Spillane” and hung up the phone. After several phone calls and messages left on Spillane’s phone, there’s has been no word on his stance with the project.

“I have no idea why,” Filkorn says of Houle’s reasons for opposing the project, “I have never asked her.”

“I think in theory, no one has a problem with he Jonesville Country Store opening up again as the Long Trail Community Market. At the same time, there are a few who disapprove with my approach and don’t really like the way that I am handling things,”

Most recently in July, Giangreco had finally cleared the way to construct a well onto the property, finally allowing him to have clean drinking water and the ability to progress with his business plans. Returning from walking his dog Wicker, he saw that the construction workers were set up and ready to drill. As a means of celebration, Giangreco decided he would take it upon himself to drive up to Huntington and grab a coffee. When he came back to the store, something unexpected had occurred.

“I came back and the drills had moved away to the front of the property, and I went, ‘What’s going on guys?’” he explains. Cowan had showed up with appeal papers citing that Giangreco was not allowed to construct a well there. He soon saw Cowan standing across the street with one of his “cronies” as Giangreco refers to him. “He was kind of just standing across the way, sort of had this little smirk on his face,” he says, “it was so frustrating.” It is something that he has been battling to understand, why would another person want to keep a fellow human being from having clean drinking water?

“I don’t have potable water right now,” he says a bit befuddled by the situation, “there’s a bunch of houses down there that just got tested, and technically you shouldn’t even be bathing in it. And I bathe in it, I drink it, I do whatever in it, and he’s keeping me from safe drinking water. On a human level, I find that completely, morally objectionable. It’s criminal behavior.” The situation has now been taken to Environmental Court, where he believes it may take over a year to resolve. The reasons behind some of this could be explained by Cowans property that he owns surrounding the store, and has caused a few problems for Giangreco.

On a dreary day, on the verge of a storm, Giangreco is walking down the rickety wooden steps that lead up to his apartment above the store. His dog Wicker stands guard as he nervously barks at anyone who approaches. Giangreco is just getting over swine flu that he contracted from his daughter, but he is dressed warm in jeans, a baggy tan sweatshirt, and dark green Crocs. While taking sips of water from a jam jar, Dan is pointing out where his property line runs, because it is something he must constantly keep in mind.

Pointing to a small road that lies behind his property, he mentions that road is owned by Cowan. “The road he says is ‘his road’” Giangreco mockingly explains, “It’s his right of way through my property. He has this very sort of protectionist approach, but also this kind of equally expansiveness approach.” His neighbors, Giangreco explains, have never waited in calling Cowan if he trespasses. In fact, while coming back from a walk with Wicker, Giangreco must walk around the road and up over the ramp that he built himself in order to avoid walking on the road at all.

Cowan has does his best at some point to instigate a situation, Giangreco says, but he decided to take the high road and walk away from temptation. It is something he thought to do before problems arose, and it has kept him out of trouble. “Normally he tries to bait me around the edge of the property,” Giangreco explains, “To get me to step across the line, or to get him to come onto my property. So when I walked away and just didn’t say anything, he just shouted at me and called me an a------. I’m just like, “(laughs) This is great.”

Giangreco takes it to the internet to express his opinion on certain situations, as he blogs on Blogspot.com under the name Rebel Market. He mainly uses a vast array of rhetorical hyperbole, but it does more than enough to agitate Cowan.

“He very recently threatened me with a SLAPP suit,” Giangreco says as he describes exactly what it means. “It basically keeps people from exercising their First Amendment rights by threatening them with a lawsuit.” Giangreco has gone as far as to issue a "fatwa" against any and all of Cowan’s businesses, which Giangreco says could be taken by the media as an Islamic threat. “It’s really just an Islamic ruling on any broad subject. So in this case it was a boycott.” Cowan claimed this was a defamation of character, but Giangreco believes it is something else. “The thing that really pissed him off is that I specifically like to use language,” he explains, “that in a very narrow context can be incendiary.”

His blog, he believes, may make people feel that he is dealing with the situation in a wrong way. Filkorn feels that it makes the situation a bit different. “I would say if you’re going to have your fight publicly,” he explains, “you won’t change the rules of zoning, but you will up the rhetorical anty. I don’t think it should have an effect on him getting permits because it is free speech.”

Cowan has yet to give comment as to exactly what his reason are against the store. In a phone call, Cowan’s wife, Kathy, expressed that her husband had no interest in commenting, but Cowan could be heard on the other line quietly explaining to her, “I have no interest in comment, talk to Chip Spillane.” Despite the opposition that has been brought against the store. There is still a large amount of support for its opening.

While making his own version of a baklava, cutting up pumpkin and boiling cranberries for a potluck for his friends, Giangreco is pacing back and forth from his counter to his oven. Max Cohn, a friend and native Richmond resident, is doing a documentary on Giangreco’s journey to open the store.

“I think in theory, no one has a problem with he Jonesville Country Store opening up again as the Long Trail Community Market. At the same time, there are a few who disapprove with my approach and don’t really like the way that I am handling things,” he says in between slicing pumpkin and making sure his cat doesn’t pounce on the counter. He says there is a lot of community support and he has been getting a constant stream of advice from other local business owners.

Filkorn admits that even friends of the opposition are privy to the idea. “I would say I have heard people close to the opposition say that we need a market,” he says, “it was a tremendous loss when the old one closed.”

“To get me to step across the line, or to get him to come onto my property. So when I walked away and just didn’t say anything, he just shouted at me and called me an a------. I’m just like, “(laughs) This is great.”

With no true deadline or opening date in sight, Giangreco tries to stay positive by saying all of the ideas he still has for the store. He still wants to be able to promote local goods and keep everything in the area, and trying to give an alternative to stores like Costco and Wal-mart. He also wants to include the arts along with the food, an idea that has been with him from the start. “We have Huntington Arts right up the road and they do a lot of great work in there,” he explains, “and they network with a lot of local artists. So the plan would be to get more local art just as a way to get people to endure.”

Giangreco still has other motivation as to why he is still continuing with the store. “I’ve always wanted to find myself in a situation where there’s a nemesis because this is an aesthetic based project and there’s a narrative to it,” he says excitedly. “I wanted to have this place, I wanted to have this revolutionary rebirth, and it’s so much better when you have an antagonist because it appeals to the younger audience when there’s a neighbor and a select board member, you know 'The Man' is trying to keep us down.”

Even though there is no end on the horizon, Giangreco says there is no need to worry. “It’s intimidating to live somewhere and have a patrol,” he says, “like this militia patrol two times a night.” He takes a moment to laugh and reflect. “It’s not an optimal living environment. I keep doing it because, again, I’m a masochist.”

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