York Corner
Jeanne (she pronounces it as if it were "Jeannie") Lombardi was pregnant with her daughter Corina when she came to York to attend a York High School graduation. The graduate was her nephew, the son of her brother, Steve Lombardi, and his wife, Pam, and Jeanne was so impressed with the experience that she decided that York was the town where Corina should grow up.
"The whole town came together to support those kids," she explained to us last Saturday, as we talked in the little shop she calls Utopia, located in the old Cape Neddick Post Office on Route 1.
In 2001, Jeanne and her husband, David, bought and moved into the house that had been the Bell Buoy bed-and-breakfast in York Harbor, and one year ago, in April 2006, together with business partners Michael Tero and his wife, Jennifer Marshall, they bought the Goodwin family's former Cape Neddick House bed-and-breakfast, a purchase that included the little post office building next door.
Daughter Corina is now seven and a first-grader at Village Elementary School, and Jeanne and David and Michael and Jennifer are now engaged in transforming the Goodwin barn and carriage house into what they say will be called The Marketplace at Cape Neddick House - a multi-vendor shop selling, Jeanne says, "everything from wine to toys and specialty foods, sprinkled with artisan wares of all types."
Utopia, which sells an eclectic mix of gifts and antiques - and which Jeanne runs with partner, Julie Robert of Kittery - will move into the new Marketplace, and taking its place in the little building will be what Jeanne termed an old-fashioned ice-cream parlor.
"It's been my dream, always, to have a café in which everything is for sale," Jeanne said.
The Marketplace will be the closest approximation to that, she added - "a very social scene, with places to sit down, read newspapers and magazines, use the internet. There will," she emphasized, "be something for everyone here."
The target date for opening all this to the public is some time in June. Jeanne didn't give us a specific date to allow for some flexibility, we guessed, in the transformation process.
And, indeed, there's work to be done.
Stepping into the barn, we met Michael, knee-deep in sawdust as the project's principal hands-on builder. He's being assisted, Jeanne told us, by his dad, (another Michael Tero, but one who's known as "Emil"), by one Don Davis, and by Nal Tero and Laurel, Nal's girlfriend, both just back from Peace Corps work, Jeanne wasn't certain where.
We regretted that there just wasn't time that day to learn more about all of these folks, and especially about that Peace Corps experience - as well as about the work of the younger Michael's wife, Jennifer, who, Jeanne told us, is a city planner for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
When we asked Jeanne about her own background and that of her husband, she told us that she'd grown up in Beverly, Mass., and David had grown up in Marblehead - and that one of the appeals of York for David was the fact that it reminded him of the Marblehead of 30 years ago.
When we asked this couple how they'd met: more stories!
"David was my client for 14 years," said Jeanne.
"Client?"
For 22 years, Jeanne, it seems, ran the Boston-based Sound Track Recording Studios, a facility she described as one of the largest of its kind in New England. It made commercials, mostly, she said, including those for McDonald's, CVS and Volkswagen, and, in so doing, dealt with most of the advertising agencies in Boston, plus some in New York. David, Jeanne reported, came to Sound Track in his capacity as a producer for radio and television - work in which he is still fully engaged as a freelancer.
How did he make the transition from client to husband?
That started, Jeanne said (smiling), when she told him, one day, that she'd just moved to Boston and was living on the corner of Beacon and Arlington Streets. He, he responded, was living just one block away, on the corner of Beacon and Berkeley.
After that, Jeanne said, they "just hung out together," in a relationship that started, happily, as a friendship.
When we asked by what route Jeanne had come to head a recording studio, she told us that her father, grandfather and uncles had all been musicians, her father playing in a pop band that performed "from Toronto to Puerto Rico," and that, when an uncle formed an entertainment agency, it morphed into a recording studio. She learned the business from the ground up, however, on her own, she said, starting as a receptionist and finishing as Sound Track's chief operating officer.
Prior to moving to York, she also told us, she'd quit that company and had been working as a consultant for four years, but missed "the people, the busy-ness, being part of a community, being connected." When she and David and their partners bought the Goodwin house, opening up Utopia was a way of regaining some of that - and of getting some experience in the local retail trade.
At Utopia, Jeanne's specialty has been the making of beautifully and creatively packaged "hostess gifts." If you're interested, however, get there no later than this weekend, for it will be the last before Utopia closes in advance of the big move.
Look for sales then, Jeanne says.
And, on our behalf, ask for some more stories…
