How Harvey Lev and Judith Bauer have transformed a long-abandoned Parrsboro icon

The first time I walked into the hulking brick building on Main Street in Parrsboro, I had no idea what to expect. A modest sign in the window promised coffee, so, intrigued, my partner Sara and I went in.

Inside, the first thing that struck me were the books. Thousands and thousands of them, all for sale, stretching around the room on long shelves, some of which seem to be buckling under the weight.

Beyond the first set of books was an open area with a few tables and couches, and a kitchen in the corner. Co-owner Judith Bauer sat behind a laptop, several relaxing dogs stretched out nearby.

As Bauer made French press coffee, I browsed the book selection, which included oddities like an unusually large selection (for Parrsboro, anyway) of works by Anglophone Montreal poets.

“The books that you saw, they’re just a private collection that I really don’t know what to do with,” says Bauer’s partner and building co-owner Harvey Lev. Both are Montrealers, which explains some of the quirks of the collection. He continues, “So I said, ‘OK, we’ll put them out there, and if we sell anything, we’ll use some of the money to keep the place going.’”

“The place” is Main & Station Nonesuch, the art gallery/residency space/sort-of-bookstore and erstwhile café this unlikely pair run in downtown Parrsboro. Housed in the long-vacant former post office building, Main & Station Nonesuch now offers residencies to artists from around the world, hosts art exhibits (including the winners of an international show of works made with and on paper), and puts on one-of-a-kind events including life drawing classes, various art workshops, readings, informal coffee talks, and even an erotic art festival. Last winter, I gave a workshop there on making sauerkraut and yogurt.

 Judith Bauer and Harvey Lev are partners in life and business with Main & Station Nonesuch.

“I really think of it as an art residency centre,” Bauer says. “The real core of it is hosting artists and providing the space to create—whatever the creative activity is. You remember the fellows from Shubenacadie who built the schooner? [The Katie Belle, built by Evan and Nick Densmore] They stayed here for a while.”

“Everybody in Canada and the United States who knows about Nova Scotia thinks it’s paradise,” Lev says. “So we offered residencies and just filled up the place with artists from around the world. Some people come here from Israel, Belgium, Holland, France, Brazil, of course the United States, and all over Canada. And they love their experience here.”

Lev bought the building nearly a decade ago, more or less on a whim. It was, he says, “in dismal shape” after having been boarded up for more than 40 years.

He first happened on it by chance.

Lev and his late long-time partner, chef Esther Hageman, were driving home to Montreal after a Cape Breton vacation when they detoured off the highway near Truro and drove along the shores of the Minas Basin to Parrsboro.

They loved it.

“It’s extraordinarily unique. On any given day, you can walk along these beautiful beaches without encountering a soul,” Lev says. “There’s just something magical about the place.”

For the next several years, Lev and Hageman returned to the town on holiday, and she was curious about the boarded-up old post office. Him? Not so much. Lev owns a paper business in Montreal, and over the years he had bought, “10 or 12 heritage or semi-heritage buildings” in the city. He had no interest in another one, especially one so far from home.

Eventually though, Lev bowed and agreed to look at the place. He was not impressed. “It was in dismal shape. It had been boarded up for 43 years… There were seven buckets collecting the rain. There was no electricity, no plumbing. It was completely empty, and it looked like it was too far gone.”

They put the idea aside. Hageman, at this point, had been living with cancer for several years. Lev recalls that during chemo treatments she could sleep 13 or 14 hours a day. One day, he looked over at her while she slept, “And I thought, you know what? I’m going to call this guy up and see what he wants for the building.”

He and the owner came to an agreement. After that, Lev and Hageman came out once a month or so, while it was being fixed up. They had planned to visit at Christmastime too, bringing along Bauer, who was a family friend. But Hageman was just too sick to travel at that point.

Meanwhile, Bauer, who has a background in the sciences (she studied biology) and in administration, was thinking about selling her Montreal home and getting out of the rapidly gentrifying Griffintown neighbourhood: “When I bought my place, there were a lot of empty parking lots and artist lofts and industry and a lot of green space. Then the developers started coming in and building towers.”

Bauer had actually considered moving to Nova Scotia in the mid-1990s, motivated in part by the great mushroom-picking on offer. (“If I have a passion in life, it’s probably fungus,” she says.) She and Hageman had had a vision of Bauer coming out to Parrsboro as “a bit of a caretaker,” with Hageman and Lev spending part of the year in Parrsboro as well, opening up the space as a home to all kinds of artists and artistic disciplines.

From left: The upstairs gallery at Main & Nonesuch; the “wave building” that Lev and Bauer purchased and use as an artist’s residence; a beautiful wooden stairwell in the former Post Office; the couple has also purchased Parrsboro’s former United Church.

“And I thought that sounded great,” Bauer says. “I could come with my dog and look after the place.” The restaurant/café has become more of a by-chance affair, but she says otherwise Main & Station remains fairly true to the vision she and Hageman had.

After Hageman passed away, Lev decided to sell the old post office building. Then, some time later, going through Hageman’s clothes and papers, he found a bunch of colourful envelopes tied together with ribbon.

“So I opened up the ribbon and
started to read through them. And
they were letters between Esther and Judith, talking about them starting
 this little two-day or three-day a week café and having an art gallery or art events or whatever,” Lev says. “I think
it was probably around two o’clock in the morning.   

“And I think I called Judith right then, and because of what was in the letters, I just asked her if she wanted the place, because I didn’t know what to do with it. And she responded kind of like, only if you come with me.”

Over the last few years, Parrsboro has been banking on the arts as a way to revive the local economy and draw tourists. The non-profit group Parrsboro Creative has as its mission to draw artists to the area for residencies and, “to create a vibrant artist and artisan community that will spearhead the rejuvenation and repopulation of Parrsboro.”

Although Main & Station isn’t formally part of Parrsboro Creative, the group’s executive director, Jocelyn Li, says, “Harvey and Judith are wonderful allies. They are fantastic folk, abundant in fresh ideas for the Parrsboro area, bringing writers, dancers, musicians and artists” to the town.

Remember the dozen or so buildings Lev owns in Montreal? He says he wound up originally buying them because he needed cheap warehouse space for his paper business. But along the way, he wound up falling in love with the buildings too, and also with the artistic tenants he rented space to
in them.

He and Bauer have carried over the habit to Parrsboro, where, in addition to buying the old post office, they now own a late 19th century duplex across the street (visiting artists regularly stay there), and the town’s former United Church.

“That’s another spectacular old building that was going to be torn down,” Lev says.

Bauer adds, “People kept asking me, ‘Oh have you seen this place?’ I was like, we have enough. I don’t want to know. And then one day I looked at the listing. I couldn’t help myself. And I thought, wow, what a beautiful building. They were already starting to strip it and it would have been torn down. So we bought it. It’s the idea of saving these old buildings—and it gives us more space for visiting artists to do stuff: to paint murals, to build sculptures, to have workshops, to create theatre.”

Lev says when he first bought the building Main & Station is in, people would stop in and share their childhood memories of the old post office. “They used to come into the building to warm their hands in the wintertime, or they’d come with their grandparents to check the mail. Stuff like that,” he says.

Although Lev originally had no interest in buying the building, now, nearly 10 years later, you can hear his passion when he talks about it. “It’s hard for someone to understand why in a town like this, the building with the most historical, architectural and public value would be so abandoned. It sits in the middle of the town, and it’s got a clock tower and it has a history. So it’s just hard to imagine.”

For now, Lev and Bauer are keeping the projects going with their own money. When I ask them about the small “for sale” sign on the Main & Station Nonesuch building, Bauer says they’re not actively trying to sell it, but they’ll entertain offers. And if they do sell, they’ll probably wind up buying up another old building to bring back to life, too.

“These are not big financial generators, you know, hosting art residences and doing exhibitions and so forth. It’s not a way to get rich,” Bauer says. “You do these things because you love to do them. Part of it is to repurpose these old buildings, but you want them to have a life… And if someone came along and wanted to pay a fair price, then that money could go into buying another old building that’s in danger and saving that. So, I guess really what we’re doing with the art is keeping life in these old buildings.”