In the last few years Darren Brown has dodged and darted around lots of obstacles that might have destroyed the little coffee shop he runs under the Ravenswood el stop at Montrose. But even the new Starbucks down the street wasn’t as big a threat as the CTA. More precisely, the CTA’s proposal to expand the waiting platforms at stops all along the Brown Line, an ambitious plan that will clear about 80 pieces of property from Kimball to Chicago Avenue–including Brown’s coffee shop, Beans & Bagels.
The wave of gentrification has continued, as more young professionals move north and west from Lakeview and Lincoln Park and the old industrial buildings along Ravenswood fill with new high-tech operations. The coffee shop is a magnet for many of these people, drawing commuters, entrepreneurs, housewives, and teens heading home from school. To accommodate them, Brown, who bought out his brother and started running the place on his own a few years back, expanded his menu to include soups and grilled sandwiches and blended fruit drinks.
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But having said all that, Feurzeig confesses that one day not so long ago she stopped in at a Starbucks. “I wanted to sit for a while to grade some papers,” she says. “Listen, it wasn’t even the one on Montrose–it was the one at Wilson and Lincoln. Well, guess what? Darren later told me, ‘I saw you.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘I saw you in that Starbucks.’ I said, ‘But I was grading papers.’ He said, ‘You can grade papers here.’”
He points out that the law is murky when it comes to the rights of renters in eminent domain cases. Property owners have to be compensated for any loss of property, so the CTA will have to pay his landlord fair market value for his property. It’s not clear what a business owner who rents that property is entitled to, if anything. “It’s something I’m talking about with my lawyer,” says Brown.
The Fullerton stop might provoke a nasty battle with DePaul University, which owns the adjoining property. Other property owners say they may fight the expansion in court. “I run a business that can’t easily be moved, no matter what they say,” says one tavern owner. “How can they guarantee that they can get me another liquor license in this area? Liquor licenses are not easy to obtain.”
