Mar 11, 2009

Coffee shop, bistro is take 2 for Savage depotBy David PetersonStarTribune.com

Between the two of them, Jim and Karen Lewis are betting a lot on their belief that the southern suburbs can succeed in creating charming, animated town centers virtually from scratch.

Karen co-owns a gift shop at a key corner of Burnsville’s Heart of the City — a project, she concedes, in which “not as much is happening as anyone in Burnsville wants.”

Jim has just opened a hybrid coffee shop and bistro a few miles to the west, in the old railway depot that has become the centerpiece of Savage’s attempt to revitalize its historic town center along Hwy. 13.

He has a cooler building than she has — and a more prominent spot, on a busy highway. But he is shouldering his own burden: He’s the second entrepreneur to try operating from the same space, after the first outing failed.

“This,” he said, “is a vastly different business than it was before. That’s not to take a shot at Annette [Grant, the teacher who ran the first business]. She worked hard here. But we took it down to the walls and started over.”

He also believes he has solved what Grant always believed was an enormous hurdle: creating visibility to the vast stream of motorists passing by without wrecking the historic integrity of the building.

The city owns the depot and leased it to Grant and, now, Lewis, and the city would not allow Grant to significantly alter the exterior to add a sign.

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