A Family Business, Reinvented: How the Bensons Keep Chapel Hill’s Tradition of Independent Places Alive

ORANGE SLICES

By Laurie Paolicelli
Guest Columnist

Mike Benson with Mom, Pam Williams.

Some families pass down a house. Others pass down a business. The Williams-Benson family passed down something harder to name — a knack for creating places that make a community feel like itself.

Pam Williams and her son Mike Benson share a birthday, born twenty-two years apart, the story goes, nearly over dinner in a booth at The Porthole restaurant. That coincidence turned out to be the first chapter in a family story that now spans more than fifty years of Chapel Hill and Carrboro life — in retail, restaurants, music, art and nightlife.

Before any of that, there were airplanes. Pam’s former husband and Mike’s father was a pilot who flew for UNC’s AHEC program out of Horace Williams Airport, the university-owned airfield just north of downtown that trained pilots, supported medical flights and even hosted a Navy pre-flight training program during World War II. Mike’s grandfather had flown biplanes in the World War I era as a reconnaissance and instructor pilot. Flight ran in the family long before Mike found his own way of making a mark on Chapel Hill — and that inherited love of aviation later resurfaced in the vintage flying memorabilia he used to decorate a restaurant he helped create in Washington, D.C.

Horace Williams Airport closed in 2018, one more once-familiar piece of Chapel Hill that exists now mostly in memory. But the instinct the Benson family carried away from it — the pull toward building places with a story behind them — never closed down at all. It just kept showing up downtown, one storefront at a time.

Pam was the one who brought that instinct to Chapel Hill’s retail scene first. In 1969, she opened Great Expectations in University Square, a maternity shop built on the simple idea that expecting mothers deserved clothes that didn’t look like a camping tent. The store evolved into New Dimensions, then into Night Gallery, a lingerie shop that moved to what’s now University Place in 1973. Over the following decades, Night Gallery grew again into Night Gallery–Branching Out, expanding into women’s clothing, gifts, antiques, art and the kind of shabby-chic, one-of-a-kind finds that turned a quick errand into an hour of browsing.

Night Gallery-Branching Out

Pam understood, instinctively, that retail is really about how a place makes people feel. Her “Men’s Night” fashion shows became local legend, and her rescue dogs were practically employees, greeting customers who came to know Night Gallery as much for its personality as for its merchandise. When Pam retired and closed the shop in the summer of 2021, she closed the book on more than fifty years in business — and on a Chapel Hill retail institution that had quietly grown up alongside the town itself.

By then, Mike had already built a reputation of his own. He grew up attending Glenwood Elementary, Phillips Middle School and Chapel Hill High School before heading to UNC and later the Savannah College of Art and Design for his BFA. Along the way he worked in restaurants and bars in Savannah and Washington, D.C., and built a career as a photographer, shooting for Rolling Stone, Icelandair, The Washington Post, XM Satellite Radio and various record labels.

A Mom and Son Moment Captured in 1984, Chapel Hill

When he came home, he brought that same eye for atmosphere to Chapel Hill and Carrboro’s food and music scene. Many longtime residents remember him best for Southern Rail and The Station, the restaurant-bar-music hall he built around vintage rail cars and the historic Carrboro train depot — a space where old railroad signs, murals and salvaged steel did as much storytelling as the menu.

Today Mike owns Lapin Bleu, a jazz bar and art gallery on Graham Street in the Midway district, where Chapel Hill and Carrboro meet. True to its French name — “blue rabbit” — it’s a place that resists easy categories: part gallery, part neighborhood bar, part unlikely sports lounge where Tar Heel basketball and Carolina Hurricanes hockey share screen time with live jazz. There’s no cover charge for the music, because Mike has always seen the place less as a venue and more as a living room — somewhere to sit down with a glass of wine, a Guinness or a Pepsi and stay a while.

Lapin Bleu

It would be easy to describe Pam Williams and Mike Benson simply as two successful entrepreneurs. But that undersells what they actually built. Neither ran a standardized business. Pam’s shop changed shape again and again because Chapel Hill kept changing around her. Mike’s ventures mix restaurants, music, photography and art in ways that resist any single label.

What they built, really, were gathering places — the kind that give a community its personality long after the storefronts change hands.

Chapel Hill and Carrboro are often described in terms of development, roads and economic growth. But just as often, they’re shaped by people willing to open a door, turn on the lights and create somewhere that didn’t exist before. For Pam, that started with a lingerie shop in 1969. For her son, it’s included railroad cars, a beer garden, jazz and a blue rabbit.

Businesses close. Airports disappear. Shopping centers get redeveloped. But families like the Williams-Bensons have a way of staying woven into a community’s story — one gathering place at a time.

Share your thoughts with me here, Laurie Paolicelli

Disclaimer: Published by Orange County’s Tourism Department through its Public Relations team, this story includes interviews and repurposed content from websites and partner press releases. For more, visit www.visitchapelhill.org or contact Laurie Paolicelli.

Laurie Paolicelli is executive director for the Chapel Hill/Orange County Visitors Bureau, a position she has held since 2005. Laurie has worked in tourism and marketing for twenty-five years, having served in leadership roles in Houston and California convention and visitor bureaus. She is a native of the Twin Ports of Duluth, MN/Superior Wisconsin. She holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business and Communications from the University Wisconsin-Superior and graduate certification in Technology In Marketing from the UNC-Chapel Hill’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. This reporter can be reached at Information@TheLocalReporter.press