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Old Dutrey’s building takes on ‘Good Life’
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David Ison points to debris in a room that he will transform into a living room above the former Dutrey’s Shoes on North Hanover Street.(Karissa Zimmer/The Sentinel)
Ison describes the construction process of the Good Life Cafe.(Karissa Zimmer/The Sentinel)
Right now, the vast interior of the former Dutrey Shoe Store on North Hanover Street is gray and unwelcoming, chilly on this winter day despite the sun shining outside. Save for the glass display case windows, any semblance of a business has been stripped by construction crews.
But David Ison doesn’t see it that way,
Instead, Ison, the new owner who is remodeling the building along with his wife, Ruth Busko, envisions a lively cafe where organic food shares the space with live music acts and a wellness center.
In keeping with the theme — and playing with Pennsylvania’s status as a commonwealth — Ison and his wife has dubbed it, “The Common Health Building.”
“This business is my life,” Ison says in his deep, rumbling voice.
The cafe and live music portion of the venue, which occupies the front of the building facing North Hanover, will be called “The Good Life Cafe” — an organic restaurant serving food from local vendors and cooked from scratch by Ison.
At the rear of the center, now just a empty, exposed space, will be is “The Keystone Acupuncture and Wellness Center,” featuring its own entrance and parking lot and run by Busko, an acupuncturist, along with her parents, Barbara Busko, a psychologist, and Carl Busko, a doctor specializing in nutrition and medicine
The second floor of the building will be the couple’s living space, a 3,000-square-foot loft featuring a massive bathroom looking out onto a small, second-floor greenhouse, a meditation sanctuary, guest rooms and an artist studio.
“We feel that it’s better for us to occupy the building and work where we live,” Ison says.
Taking a step back from Ison’s imagination, the real-life incarnation of the upstairs of the building is quite different. Blanketing the floor is an old, but still bright, red carpet. On the walls is turn-of-the-century wallpaper, evidence to Ison’s theory that the last time someone actually lived in the building was 1910. Still, the bones of the architecture are good and there’s a beautiful walnut archway in the living space, one of the few things Ison isn’t planning to gut.
“We’re gonna rock it,” says Ison, whose vocabulary is peppered with “Yeah, mans!”and “groovy.”
The ‘perfect place’
Like Ison’s lingo, plans for the “Good Life Cafe, began in another era.
At the time, Ison, then a fellow at MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies, was hosting a radio show on the Cambridge, Mass., campus. As part of the format, Ison started rhapsodizing about “The Good Life,” a virtual cafe where artists would drop in to dish music with a sprinkling organic food talk, all done in a cool, inviting — and virtual — atmosphere.
Fast-forward to 2006 and Ison — who heads Therasound, where he composes and records therapeutic music that go to hospital and health facilities and spas— and his wife were living in Baltimore. Busko had grown up in rural Perry County and she wanted to move closer to her family.
“We wanted to get out of the city and get back to the farm,” Ison says.
And so began the search for a building that could host Ison’s dream cafe. When he saw the former shoe store on North Hanover, he knew he had found The One.
“I said, ‘Oh, my God, it’s the Good Life Cafe,” he recalls. “The idea fit the space.”
Sure, the building was expansive, but Ison also felt the location on North Hanover Street in the historic district suited a cafe and music venue.
“It’s perfect place to do what we want to do,” He says. “Location, location, location.”
In addition to restoring the building to its original facade, the couple also are “greening” the building. Ison says this means they’ll increase the energy efficiency of the heating and cooling systems, replace all the windows with thermal panes and use nontoxic carpeting material and nontoxic interior paint.
Downtown destination
At the heart of center, literally, will be the cafe and music venue.
Ison grows excited when he talks of the cafe, making sweeping, grand gestures that mirror his big plans.
Essentially, he says, the cafe will be a soup bar and gourmet deli, but beyond that there will be a stage for artists, accompanied by seating for about 100 people and a state-of-the art recording studio.
“This is a big concept,” he says excitedly, “This is going to be the best, the most intimate setting, with a first rate PA system and an on-site recording studio.”
Ison says he hopes to make “Live at the Good Life Cafe” central Pennsylvania’s premier location for top-shelf, acoustic performers of all kinds — including jazz, blues, world music, folk, American roots music and classical string quartets — and downtown Carlisle itself a night life destination.
“The point of this whole thing is to attract outside of Carlisle and to bring night life to North Hanover,” he says.
As a composer, musician and chef himself, Ison is a something of a renaissance man. The opening of the restaurant, he says, is the culmination of his dreams.
“At 55, this is a life’s work and a life’s dream come to fruition,” he says. “To be doing this with my wife is the joy of my life.”
