You’ve all heard the story by now, Ald. Craig Schmid has a moritorium on liquor licenses for the 20th Ward. You want to sell beer, then you need to have 50% of your revenues from food. In other words, restaurants are OK, bars are not. Enter Steve Smith, owner of The Royale on Kingshighway near Arsenal. Smith wants to open a bar along Cherokee street and and serve no food in the space located at 3227 Cherokee known as “Radio Cherokee.”
The controversy has escalated to the point that Schmid, a 12-year veteran at city hall, is being challenged by resident and business owner Galen Gondolfi in the election for alderman to be held on the 6th of March. This issue has some fun little twists and turns that I have not seen in the media.
First, opponents cite a number of concerns. One is parking, another is food sales. Of course, I fail to see how Smith getting 50% of receipts from food sales lessons the parking issue any — it might in fact make it worse? Parking too seems like a red herring, the city has literally thousands of corner storefront places but we cannot expect them to each have a dedicated parking lot without destroying the character of our neighborhoods.
Above is the location in question, located on the NE corner of Virginia (street on left) and Cherokee. The very tiny storefront can only hold so many people and quite a bit of on-street parking is available along the side of the building above (on Virginia). Similarly, more cars could easily be parked on the west side of Virginia.
“The neighborhood is not ready,” was one comment I heard. Well, what defines ready? What is the plan to get the area ready? Granted, this property is much closer to Gravois and is therefore not part of the main commercial area we think of as Cherokee. This is outside the Cherokee community improvement district. Still, every block between here and the main section of Cherokee contains at least a single storefront, in many cases several.
On the same block as “Radio Cherokee” is the former Cherokee Auto Parts with a greenhouse/nursery business on the end of the block. In the background of the picture you can see a corner storefront on the next block. Back to the site in question.
The small place is actually part of a 4-unit building, with one residential unit above and two attached but set back from the street. The building lot is only 24ft 8 inches wide. So as you can imagine, both the residential units and the bar space are narrow.
Peaking inside through the front door glass we can see a place basically ready to go. No major build out or extensive rehab required. Currently the space is simply sitting empty, not being productive for the neighborhood or city. Now, I’ve never been in the food services business (well, except those 4 days at Arby’s when I was 16) but logic tells me you need a certain volume of business to operate a restuarant. With such a small place and lacking a kitchen space it seems unrealistic to expect this space to be anything but a bar.
Sure, I suppose it could be gutted and turned into a retail space of sorts but that seems even more likely to fail. Retail operations would do better in the main commercial district.
Currently, to my knowledge, Cherokee street has no master plan — no vision has been established. In looking at the blocks on this end with a mix of storefronts of varying sizes, flats and single family homes I see a small bar fitting in nicely, nothing too big. A block or two east is the old Black Forest restaurant which has been closed for sometime. That is a very large space with a large kitchen (I’ve shown the building to prospective buyers so I’ve been through the whole thing). It is even complete with a parking lot. But the pro-forma to buy and renovate that place relative to this is night and day. In reality, both spaces need to be open and active. We just can’t fault Steve Smith for not having the cash/credit of a say Joe Edwards.  The old Black Forest space will make an excellent restaurant once again. As a bar only, it would be way too big.
So my solution to this issue is this — for Cherokee Street only: Set up a sliding scale, the very tiny Radio Cherokee space that Steve Smith is interested in should have a zero percent food requirement. On the other end, spaces like the large Black Forest should be required to have 50% food. Other storefronts, such as the old Auto Parts place, might fall somewhere in the middle. What this does is set up a guideline along Cherokee only where small bars can be introduced and have a chance to succeed while the larger spaces cannot be bars only. This should be implimented along the length of Cherokee from at least Jefferson to Gravois while the area works on a master plan for Cherokee.
In the interest of disclosure, I have not spoken with either candidate about this concept but I did happen to run into Steve Smith yesterday and he seemed to think it might be a good compromise. In researching this post I discovered that Galen Gondolfi owns the property in question along with another person. He also owns the old auto parts place on the same block. He owns larger buildings in the next block east where he lives, has a gallery space and leases out a storefront to a cafe. He clearly has a vested interest in seeing this section of Cherokee street succeed and prosper.
