Downtown Chiropractic Office Gets a Dramatic Adjustment

For years, visitors to 39 Depot Street came downtown looking for an adjustment. Soon they will still be able to get one, although the treatment will involve considerably more Champagne.

The City is pleased to announce that the longtime Notcross Family Chiropractic storefront will reopen this autumn as Vertebrae, an oyster bar and Champagne room. The practice, which operated at the address for nineteen years, relocated in June to a larger ground-floor suite on Holcomb Avenue with parking at the door.

The City describes the project as another product of the Notcross Reversal, the recently adopted and somewhat controversial theory that downtown commercial buildings should contain businesses people actually want to visit.

Why Vertebrae

The new owners were asked whether they had considered a name with less spine to it. They had not.

"The building was a chiropractor's office for nineteen years," one of the partners said. "Everybody downtown knows it as that. You can either pretend that didn't happen, or you can put it on the sign."

The tagline, which will appear on the window, is Properly Aligned Shellfish. A secondary line runs on the sidewalk board: Good Shell. Good Health. Good Times.

The owners are firm that the joke stops at the door. Vertebrae is not a novelty restaurant. The food, the service and the room are intended to be seriously good, and the name is simply the truth about the building.

What it will be

The room is deliberately small: twenty-five to thirty-five seats around a marble raw bar, plus a handful of sidewalk tables. Eight to twelve oysters rotate nightly. There is grower Champagne and sparkling wine by the glass, caviar service, chilled shrimp and crab, martinis, classic cocktails, and a short list of hot dishes.

There are no televisions, no fried seafood platters and no fourteen-page menu. The reference points the owners cite are the neighbourhood oyster bars of Charleston and New Orleans rather than anything suburban.

The coffee shop keeps the mornings

Vertebrae will not open until four in the afternoon.

This is deliberate. Cardinal Coffee Co. has operated next door at 37 Depot Street since 2020 and owns the downtown morning. Vertebrae has no interest in competing for it, and has structured its hours accordingly: coffee in the morning, oysters and Champagne at night, in two adjacent buildings, from two independent small businesses that do not take a dollar from each other.

That arrangement is becoming the City's stated approach. The Economic Development office has stopped trying to fill storefronts one at a time and started thinking about which businesses make the ones beside them better.

"We spent years asking what major project would transform downtown," the City Manager said. "We are beginning to realise that thirty really good small businesses might be the major project."

The building barely changes

Unlike the larger projects of the past two years, this one requires very little construction. The brick storefront and its distinctive roofline stay exactly as they are. The work is restored windows, dark-painted doors and trim, brass exterior lighting, signage, planters, a few café tables, and warm interior lighting visible from the pavement.

Revitalisation does not always require a multimillion-dollar public project. Sometimes you just need a good tenant.

Parking

In another departure from longstanding municipal tradition, officials did not require Vertebrae to construct a 47-space parking lot behind its 1,800-square-foot oyster bar.

Customers will instead use the existing downtown public parking and walk. City planners acknowledged that this practice, known elsewhere as going downtown, remains relatively new to Notcross.

The permitting

The owners submitted plans. Staff reviewed them. Staff identified problems. The owners corrected them. The City issued the permits.

Nobody declared a moratorium. Nobody commissioned a study. Nobody scheduled an eight-month stakeholder process. Nobody asked the oyster bar to solve downtown parking.

From application to approval the process took thirty-one days, narrowly beating the previous Notcross record of four municipal administrations.

A note for the preservation debate

The project also offers City leaders an unexpected data point in the ongoing historic-preservation debate, which returns to Council next month.

Old buildings appear considerably easier to preserve when someone has an economically viable reason to maintain them.

Nobody proposed demolishing 39 Depot Street. Nobody had to be prevented from doing so. A tenant wanted the building, and wanting the building turned out to be the most effective preservation instrument available to the City, which had not budgeted for it.

Why a small thing matters

The significance of Vertebrae is precisely that it is small.

One formerly ordinary storefront becomes interesting. That draws people downtown. Those people walk past other businesses. Some of them come back for coffee next door the following morning. Some have dinner elsewhere. Some shop. The collection is the destination; no single tenant is.

Vertebrae is expected to open this autumn, pending final inspections and delivery of the raw bar. City officials said they are optimistic.

For generations, Notcross asked residents to imagine what downtown could become. At Vertebrae, they will soon be able to stop imagining, order a dozen oysters and a bottle of Champagne, and see for themselves.