RENSSELAERVILLE — Jesse James’s relationship with the now-closed Palmer House Café began before he moved to the little hamlet that the popular restaurant once anchored. 

When he and his business partner and poet husband, Kostas Anagnopoulos, lived in West Fulton, Schoharie County, it was one of two go-to places whenever they hosted guests from out of town — the other being the American Hotel in Sharon Springs.

“Those were the two really lovely restaurants that were in reach of us,” James told The Enterprise this week. “Both quite a drive, but both really wonderful experiences.” 

James and Anagnopoulos once both ran a firm called Aesthetic Movement, which has been described in New York Social Diary as a “design think tank” that “provides a range of services including branding, marketing, designing and overseeing launches of products in the gift, home, jewelry and personal accessories market.”

Anagnopoulos now owns an antiques shop in Oak Hill, while James, who is still the president of Aesthetic Movement, is the founder and show director of Shoppe Object, a semiannual home and gift show.

It was a bit of luck and a bit of design that led the couple to buy a home just a few doors down from the Palmer House, after first hearing about the listing through conversation while they were in the market, then realizing the personal significance of its location. Soon enough, they’d wind up owning the property itself.

The Palmer House

The Palmer House Café was founded by Bill Benson and Susan Lenane in 1986, after they bought the property from Robert and Edith Lansing, who had run a shop out of it, according to the history page of Palmer House’s website. The building itself was constructed in 1801 as a home, then became an inn, and eventually, for more than 100 years, a shop. For much of its history, the property was a central location in the hamlet, housing the town’s first telephones. 

Benson and Lenane named their café after the historic Palmer House Hotel in Chicago, which had been founded by Potter Palmer, who was raised in Rensselaerville’s Potter Hollow.

“My sense of Palmer House is that it was really part of an early food movement …,” James said. “I think there are lots of people in this town who have talked about how valuable Palmer House was for a sense of community, but also in helping people understand food, agriculture, and the early farm-to-table movement.”

When it became clear that the Palmer House would close, James said there was an effort to save it before the liquor license ran out, the hope being that an owner could avoid the expensive process of re-obtaining it, but the effort failed. 

“We sort of watched people for many years come and look at the building and drum up some ideas of what it could be and then not pull the trigger,” he said. 

When he himself had looked into buying it, he was “a little overwhelmed by the severity” of the preservation process that would be required.

Eventually, having grown up in Chicago restaurants and understanding the value of a place to “gather around breaking bread,” James and Anagnopoulos decided to take it on. 

Myths and reality

Despite the popularity of the Palmer House, news of the restoration efforts hasn’t been entirely welcome. An unsubstantiated opinion piece, written by a Rensselaerville resident who could not be reached by The Enterprise, was published in the Times Union earlier this month, suggesting that the town was being taken over by profiteers, who hoped to establish a “high-end restaurant and a venue for destination weddings.”

“Beautiful old houses, historic church, a quiet village that itself has been on the Historic Register for the past 40 years — that’s on one side,” the piece read. “On the other, a money-making opportunity, the hype of enterprise, and a willingness to tolerate attendant noise, unwelcome odors, congested streets and late-night interruption.”

It also alluded to a rumor about plans to create 55 parking spaces that James said he has been confronted about, leading in part to an open meeting at Conkling Hall earlier this month to address the truth of the matter.

The business plan for the Palmer House property, James said, is essentially to create a spiritual successor, not a replica by the same name — to “step in where Bill Benson left off, and revive the restaurant and tavern and do it in our own vein.”

An enormous part of the project, which James is hoping will come together in time for a 2024 opening, is “a lot of work on just stabilizing the foundation and digging into those less sexy elements of saving a building and creating a restaurant.”

They’ve also submitted for tax credits related to historic preservation, he said, reiterating that they’re “incredibly conscious about restoring every aspect of this building to its original status that we possibly can,” and honoring its place as a building on the National Registry of Historic Places.

The opening would be done in stages, James said, starting with the front and side rooms which will house the restaurant, and then an expanded communal space.

“Eventually, we’ll bring the tavern into play, and we also hope to have a provisional element … if people are coming to the Huyck Preserve and want to grab something,” he said, adding that the hours would be similar to what they had been originally. 

There’s no intention of creating it specifically for weddings, though James said they’d be as open to wedding requests as Conkling Hall or the local church are. 

“Yes, there probably will be a wedding at some point,” he said. “If my daughter wanted to get married at the restaurant, I’d let her. But we are not building a wedding venue. That is not our intention and has nothing to do with what the restaurant is.”

As for the parking spaces, they’re simply redesigning the old parking lot in the same footprint so that it’s less “haphazard,” James explained, and per the town’s instructions. It will not fit 55 cars — just 15, according to a referral of the project to the Albany County Planning Board by the Rensselaerville Planning Board.

“I have no idea where that number came from,” James said of the 55-space rumor. 

A potential source of confusion that James brought up was an old rumor about a wedding venue being planned at the Carey Institute, which was also untrue.

In 2020, as The Enterprise then reported, the institute had received an unsolicited offer to buy the campus from Akiva Reich who had wanted to create a wedding venue there — but that plan never materialized.

Whatever the source, and however deeply the rumor has penetrated the community, James said that those who showed up for the Conkling Hall meeting were generally supportive, with some inevitable concerns about noise, traffic, late-night hours, and so on.

“We were able to, I think, put people’s minds at ease …,” he said. “I was a little disappointed that whoever the voices were who have been detractors or have been negative didn’t show up in a significant way, because I think it would have been good.”