Where This Began –
Sorry for all the storefront posts. I’ll be back in the shop tomorrow to build chests and such.
Several people have asked where the idea came from to buy a storefront in Covington, Ky., and move our business and lives there.
The answer is the building above. It’s at the corner of Pike and Madison streets, the commercial center of the city. My wife’s family owned the Grote Drug store there — plus the Super D pharmacy down the road. My mother in law worked there. My father in law. My wife. And many of her relatives going back to the point where the names are unfamiliar to me (even after 23 years of marriage).
Like many businesses in Covington, the bottom fell out as commerce moved to suburban Florence. The family drugstores closed. And the family lost everything.
That event, while terrible, also instilled in Lucy a sense of financial levelheaded-ness and an acumen for revenge.
How could I not fall in love with that?
Though we’ve always been writers with lame salaries, we never went into debt. And when our kids grew up, we resolved together to move to Covington and run our business there. Completing the circle.
We’ve been looking for a building for four years — this wasn’t a lark. And when we toured the Blaze at 837 Willard St. We knew. We put in an offer that same day.
And now the hard part begins — making it our final nesting place.
I’m typing this while covered head to toe with grime at Braxton Brewing, the brewery down the road from us. And as I walked here with a mighty thirst I passed a lot of other people with the same idea that we had. Tech startups. Design firms. Artist studios. And the stores that survived the crash (thank you Klingenberg’s hardware).
We hope you can stop by sometime after we open in March and get a small taste of this up-and-coming city.
— Christopher Schwarz
