At their meeting on Tuesday, March 24, Oak Park’s president and trustees consented to the 7 Lake St. building being used as a drive-through coffee shop. It’s a transformation for the property that owner and developer Greg Sorg purchased in 2015. Initially, his plan was to continue operating the long existing Minit Car Wash.
“We just were bleeding money,” Sorg said.
He shut the operation down and started searching for a new tenant. One possibility was a distillery. Another was a coffee shop. Sorg’s goal was to increase the foot traffic and the business community at the east end of Lake Street, but years passed.
Sorg also owns the building next door at the southwest corner of Lake and Austin, the home of One Lake Brewing. When it came time to renew their five-year lease, he also took stock of the 7 Lake St. building that was sitting empty and unused.
“I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s been 5 years.’ I was like, I’m the problem,” he said. “Me holding out for someone else to fill the space has unintentionally challenged One Lake and not helped fulfill my goal for the block.”
With no tenants forthcoming, Sorg started to imagine what he’d like to see in the space, which has a bow truss roof and therefore is an open wall-to-wall space.
“The goal is to get something vibrant,” he said.
His idea: in the a.m. hours operate a drive-through coffee shop, literally driving through the building, using the overhead doors on Lake Street and North Boulevard.
“[Customers] can come in and just drive through and grab it and go,” he said. “And it’s going to be good quality coffee. And then after that, this would become a more open space. You could have a stage for entertainment and nighttime stuff. You could have tables. It could almost be kind of like a food court or dining hall sort of area. I’m still toying with the idea of, like, pets. You could almost have like a dog park, like mini dog park in here.”
Sorg’s plan doesn’t include building out a full kitchen. He’s talking with One Lake Brewing about a collaboration. There are other ideas floating around in his mind.
“It’s not just a coffee place,” he said. “I think it’ll be a cool space. We’ll leave it all open. It’ll be nice and bright. We just gotta figure out exactly. It’ll be a little bit of a destination, hopefully, and that hangout component. I think we’ll come up with something good.”