The little beer shop is named for a dog, Frank, who went to heaven a couple of years ago. It was open for less than a week when the creek did rise.
This was 10 days ago in the rain, 9:30 on a Thursday night, down at the end of Commonwealth Avenue in a hidden pocket of east Charlotte, where Frank’s opened next to an auto repair business, a beauty salon, and a record shop, all along Edwards Branch, a small stream that feeds Briar Creek, which runs past an old coliseum nicknamed The Biscuit, in a city some say lacks character.
Joe Smaldone spent five years trying to open Frank’s. Now he could only watch as puddles became pools, then a pop-up river. Soon the water licked the front door. He rolled up a towel, stuffed it at the base, and called his wife.
“I might have to sleep here,” he said.
Most cars turned around, but a few big ones splashed through the flash flood and caused a wake, waves crashing against the door of this just-begun dream.
Smaldone, 34, had a stable career in graphic design — working with UNC athletics, the Houston Astros, and Barstool Sports — but during the pandemic he decided he wanted to work for himself. After a long search, he signed a lease in Commonwealth Park in January and spent five months building it out, nail by nail, mostly by himself. Behind the bar, he hung a big portrait of Frank in a tuxedo.
But now, six days in, he was holding that towel and thinking: “It’s already going to be gone?”
He shot off a quick Instagram post. A neighbor replied: I’ll be there in five.
There were heroes across Charlotte that stormy night, when some areas of the city saw up to 5 inches of rain in less than three hours. Firefighters rescued more than 30 people, including 13 who got trapped along Sugar Creek in Freedom Park, and 18 more in a mobile home park along Steele Creek.
These moments rarely lead the news for long anymore, what with everything else to worry about. The day’s top stories were about the National Guard in Los Angeles, and the death of Beach Boys singer Brian Wilson. By weekend’s end there would be news of mass protests and pending wars, which would only escalate.
A little neighborhood beer shop isn’t all that important in the grand scheme, I guess. Then again, maybe it’s the sort of thing that matters most.
Jim McGivney lives up the hill from Frank’s. He’d watched Smaldone pour his sweat and savings into transforming the old fitness studio into a beer shop. So when he saw the call for help that night, he gathered some supplies and put on his boots.
Jimmy and his wife, Jen, are among my closest friends. He’s a middle-aged guy with a big Irish heart and a nose for a neighborhood pub. It’s not so much about the beer — though Jimmy likes that part — but the comfort of curveball chatter in familiar spaces.
They moved to Commonwealth Park a couple years ago, after 17 years in Madison Park. They fit right in. The neighborhood is full of Gen Xers and older millennials in renovated 1940s homes. It’s a terrific slice of this teardown town, known mostly for what it’s near — Central Avenue, Bojangles Coliseum, Plaza Midwood — and suits people who want to be close to everything but also kinda want to be left the hell alone.
It’s also a neighborhood for dog people, which Jen and Jimmy definitely are. She once set out to write a story about Charlotte Animal Care & Control, and wound up adopting a girl they named Phoebe. They had another dog, a big brown boy named Charley who’d sit by his food bowl at the same time every evening. When Charley died suddenly in 2023, Jen and Jimmy sheltered in place for days with their grief.
This is all to say that a neighborhood bar named after a dog was high on their list of most anticipated openings.
Apparently it was for the whole neighborhood.
“You Frank?” a new customer asked when he walked into Frank’s this past week. It’s probably the most frequent question.
“I’m Joe,” Smaldone said.
He turned around and pointed to the portrait on the wall.
“That’s Frank.”
Smaldone was a student at Ithaca College in New York 14 years ago when he adopted a husky-German Shepherd mix. The landlord said no dogs, so Frank stayed with Joe’s parents until he graduated. Then they hit the road as Joe launched his career: Chapel Hill, Tampa, Houston, Charlotte, and New York City. (Frank hated New York City.)
During the pandemic, Joe started homebrewing. Friends liked what he made, so he made more. He met with several people in the local brewery industry and kept simplifying the business idea. He went from thinking he’d own a big brewery to a small brewery to a small beer shop.
He considered a street-level space in one of those new apartment buildings, but couldn’t make the math or mood work. He wanted a space he would visit even if he wasn’t working — something like Brawley’s, the Thirsty Beaver, or Salud. But cinderblocks and grit are increasingly rare near the center of town, and he grew frustrated. Then in 2023, Frank died.
“I honestly got pretty close to giving up,” Smaldone says.
But late last year he found a 600-square-foot hole in Commonwealth Park’s heart. His wife, Leigha Bannon, loved it, too. He pitched his plan to the landlords, and they liked it. He signed a lease, knowing it sat in a flood zone.
He worked every day at the shop. As neighbors passed and asked when he’d open, he got the sense that this community of step-counting dog-walkers needed a place to gather. He remembers telling Leigha, ”I think we, like, hit a gold mine.”
He needed it to be that. By April he was out of savings. He launched a Founding Members club to bring in a little cash. He expected family and close friends to join, but the response was something else — dozens of neighbors he hadn’t met yet chipped in $150 apiece.
Frank’s debuted on Friday, June 6, with hardly a media mention. Handshakes were his only public relations campaign.
That first day, it was slammed. Neighbors showed up with dogs and kids. Strollers lined the sidewalk. The first week exceeded every projection he’d made.
Then, on Thursday, June 12, it started raining.
Jimmy grabbed a wet vac, a rake, a leaf blower, and his hiking boots and waded into the flood.
“I didn’t know if there was anything I was going to be able to do, but I thought I’d try,” he told me. “He’d just opened and we’d seen him put in all this work. I didn’t want him to have to shut down.”
Streetlights lit the scene in yellow. Jimmy could see Joe inside the shop and the waves lapping against the door. He crossed the intersection, where the water was thigh-deep and nearly caused him to lose his balance. He tried to talk to Joe, but they couldn’t hear each other. He raked debris from the three street drains. Trash from an upstream dumpster had clogged one of them.
Then he moved three wooden planters, creating a berm that diverted water from the door. Somewhere around then he noticed an outdoor fan was still running, and the plug was underwater.
“Um,” he mouthed through the window, “can you flip the breaker?” So Joe did.
Soon the water was receding back toward Edwards Branch. Jimmy went home and grabbed towels and moving blankets. He put a blanket against the door of The Stylehouse salon and handed one to Joe for the shop.
Both businesses were safe. Frank’s could open the next day for week two. Joe thanked Jimmy. The owner of the salon posted a picture on the neighborhood Facebook page with a big thank you for Jimmy, small-business savior, and the hearts piled up.
Charlotte loves to boast about the corporations it recruits and the developments it stands up. But it’s the small businesses, owned by people who risk their savings, that breed loyalty and love.
As Jimmy put it: “I’m sure you’d find people who’d do this for something like the Common Market. But nobody’s going over to Total Wine with a rake.”
A few days later, Jimmy stopped by his new neighborhood gathering spot again. Joe handed him a handful of free beer tokens, purchased by the salon owner.
And on the wall near the door, across from the portrait of the dog in the tuxedo who looks over everything, was a framed photo of Jimmy, pulled from the security camera footage of that night, after the water had gone down. A loyal friend, smiling, soaked, and looking like he could use a good shake.
