Miller previously owned Evo Gallery in Old Town in the 1990s and has the distinction of naming Final Friday years ago. He plans to use the gallery crawl for public openings. In fact, the gallery will open on Final Friday in June. Otherwise, it’s by appointment only except for an occasional special event.
“I’m really kind of narrowing it down to focusing in on buyers, and the way you do that is limit access,” Miller says. “Really in a town of this size if you restrict the access, you actually increase the interest.”
On the ground floor, Miller will showcase more traditional landscape art. Upstairs, he’ll feature more contemporary art.
Miller says he wants visitors to see the art with furniture so they can visualize what it would look like in their own homes.
He says he’s doing the gallery “to represent artists locally and sell the work.” He’ll feature some regional artists as well.
Showcasing the bed and breakfast is a nice side benefit, too, Miller says.
WICHITA — Former Brews Brothers Ice House Bar and Grill partner Luis Lopez has purchased the west-side Emerson Biggins near 21st and Maize Road.
The Old Town Emerson Biggins is a separately owned business.
By May 9, Lopez hopes to have most of the old Brews Brothers menu in place.
“We’re going to have the same fun food and the same great times that we had at the Brews Brothers bar and grill.”
That includes dishes such as his pork chili, fried flour tacos, sweet pepper pastrami sandwich and signature Reuben.
“I thought I was going to change the name, but we decided to keep it Emerson Biggins,” Lopez says.
He says he gave up his two Brews Brothers restaurants, which were near 13th and Tyler and South Seneca and I-235, to concentrate on nine Burger King restaurants.
“I didn’t have the flexibility to run all of them.”
At the time, similar restaurants such as Old Chicago were expanding to more Wichita locations.
“I had a better opportunity with the Burger Kings.”
Now, he thinks his opportunity is with Emerson Biggins. Lopez would like to open one on the east side in 2013 followed by one in Hutchinson.
The city of Wichita has produced an official response to a recent skit on Kimmel’s show that spoofs the city as a “Wichitawesome” place for spring break.
The video itself isn’t so official, though. Instead, it takes off on a spring break theme where a cardboard cutout Jimmy Kimmel gets drunk off a beer bong at an Old Town bar, vomits by the Arkansas River and gets some handsy treatment from a TSA agent at the airport.
“It went right there to the edge, but it does have natural attention, and individuals are looking at it,” Mayor Carl Brewer says.
He says staff in the city manager’s office, including spokeswoman Lauragail Locke, produced the video. Brewer first saw it Tuesday. By this morning, it had 3,000 views.
Brewer says if he and City Council members had produced the video, “we’d probably have been a lot more conservative than that, but then if we had done it, we’d have a lot less than 3,000 hits.”
“So I think we were on the mark,” she says. “Our goal was to produce a video that would appeal to his late night talk show television audience in the hopes of getting on national TV. … We just want to draw more attention to our city and show that we are a fun place, and we have a lot to offer.” Locke says the main point was to invite Kimmel here.
She adds, referring to the city’s cable network, “It was definitely not meant for a City7 audience.”
Locke says she’s not sure how much the video cost, but she says money spent was mainly for the cutout that a company produced and a sound effect that was used in the video. It was shot with city staff and equipment.
The mayor’s response was to call Kimmel field producer Sarah Robe, a native Wichitan, and invite the talk show host to town. That’s when he says he heard that “many of the staff there thought Wichita was a fictitious city.”
“She had to educate them and tell them no, whoever did it did their homework, and it was a real city.”
Robe tells Have You Heard? that staffers do in fact know of Wichita, but they didn’t realize that places in the video, such as Scotch & Sirloin, are real.
“That’s why it’s funny, too, and why it resonates because it’s a town that everyone’s heard of,” she says.
Writer Jonathan Bines is responsible for the original Wichitawesome video spoofing Wichita as a great spring break destination.
“Whenever a comedy writer thinks about the top anything, they immediately try to think of what the bottom might be,” he says. “It’s nothing against Wichita.”
UPDATED — St. Francis in Old Town between Douglas and Second Street continues to develop.
The newest addition will be Mr. Diggs Dwelling & Co., a shop that will open later this month on the northeast corner of First and St. Francis.
That’s halfway between the newly renovated Zelman Lofts at Douglas and St. Francis and the new urban park going in at Second and St. Francis.
“When you go shopping it should be fun,” says Annette Shankle, who is opening the shop.
“There should be laughter. There should be excitement that you’ve bought (a) piece.”
Shankle, with help from her sister, Linda Fisher, plans to sell furniture, home decor, art and lamps in 5,500 square feet of what Shankle calls “warehouse-esque” space across from Tracy’s Automotive.
“It’s all about unique pieces,” she says. “We don’t want to be the same as everything else in town.”
She wants her customers to buy items that cause others to say, “Wow, where did you get that?”
Shankle’s merchandise will be old and new.
“We all want to mix new and old in our homes. That’s kind of the new way of decorating.”
Mr. Diggs will be open 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday – but only during the third week of every month.
