Mount Hope neighbors are united against a plan to turn the former Clarke Flower Shops into a drive-through coffee shop.
The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires
“I would hate to see that all change,” his daughter Renee Grant-Kane wrote recently to city officials.
Swapping a quiet former flower shop for the traffic generated by a drive-through coffeehouse, she said, could turn “my dad’s simple, quiet, peaceful life” upside down.
Grant-Kane and her dad’s neighbors mobilized quickly when the coffee house was proposed, and remain united a year later. They have support from city officials and a lawyer to represent their interests while the owner, developer and potential tenant — Brewed Awakenings — asks the court see it their way.
Like many small businesses, Schartner Flowers LLC has struggled to stay in bloom with the dreary economy. Independent florists have wilted more than most because of sprouting competition from cyberspace florists and nearby grocery stores, owner Tim Schartner and his lawyer says.
Three of Tim Schartner’s four locations in Rhode Island have closed over the last few months or limited their business to only a gift shop. The former Clarke Flowers, at 398 Hope St. — little more than a half-mile away from Whole Foods on North Main Street, where its website boasts of roses from farms in the Ecuadorian Andes — shut down in April. All of its orders are filled from Schartner’s remaining store, in East Greenwich.
Foreclosure on the Providence property is getting harder to avoid, Schartner says, because since it closed, its earnings no longer offset most of the $7,500 he pays each month for its mortgage, insurance and taxes.
Schartner, who lives in Wickford with a new baby and wife, says his savings account was drained months ago and he doesn’t have access to the wealth of his father’s Schartner Farms, with headquarters in Exeter.
Tim Schartner independently purchased Clarke and the others two years ago, he says, and “they were losing money when I bought them. I thought I could do something creative with them, but I kept running into roadblocks.”
Schartner says he thought a December 2009 purchase-and-sale agreement with Atlantic Capital Real Estate Inc., conditional on keeping a commercial business in a residential zone, was his out from at least his Hope Street money pit.
“Quite honestly, that’s not our problem,” says Peter Thornton, a Howell Street resident with childhood memories of Clarke Florist’s many deliveries to his church. “If you want a drive-through coffee shop, go down to North Main.”
Thornton is one of a dozen core residents fighting the proposal to raze the greenhouses and 1890s structure and replace them with an 88-seat coffeehouse. The opponents update all who are interested — 63 families and properties are within 200 feet — with fliers, a Facebook page and a website (www.preservehopestreet.org).
A Zoning Board of Review meeting in March was crowded with opponents. Twenty-five testified, and 39 letters like Grant-Kane’s were sent. The commission’s file on the dispute runs for 551 pages.
Ket Fox, of Carrington Avenue, warned that “fatter Dumpster-diving rats” and a “quadrupling of Hope Street rush-hour traffic” could arrive with the java. Most residents who commented say they fear the coffeehouse would be a safety hazard for the neighborhood’s many children and walkers. There’s a daycare, elementary school, YMCA, city recreation center and Hope High School all nearby.
The diverse Mount Hope area has everything: fancy homes and less-than-modest ones; new East Siders and long-timers with roots dating three generations back; and an assortment of religions, cultures and ethnicities.
“Many people think that a coffee shop/flower store with a few Schartner Farms pies thrown in sounds pretty yummy,” wrote Kath Connolly in one Internet posting.
But she and other protesters also say a 12-car drive-through can’t be part of the deal. Some also want the building, or at least what they say is its “historic” façade, saved.
“The most disappointing is, they tried to villainize the project,” said John O. Mancini, Schartner’s lawyer. “It was designed with the neighborhood in mind.”
Mancini rattled off features he considers pleasing: a new home-like building with cedar shingles, shrub buffers to distance the commercial structure, shielded trash and a low-lighting menu board for the drive-through.
Only six people, none of them residents, spoke at the hearing in support of Brewed Awakenings.
A traffic expert said the project would not add a lot of new traffic to the area, which already sees more than 1,300 cars during peak morning hours.
A real estate planning expert’s report said the current structure “exceeded the end of its economic life and is in extreme disrepair.”
A structural engineer talked of its cracked foundation, collapsed ceilings and need for a new roof.
And Dave Levesque, president of Brewed Awakenings, said the drive-through is necessary for it to be “economically feasible.”
Under a different name, Clarke Flowers began before the city chopped itself into zones, and its grandfathered status isn’t transferable.
The Zoning Board denied Schartner and company’s request for a use variance in a 4-to-1 vote. The city’s Department of Planning and Development also opposed the plan.
“With a [purchase-and-sale agreement] signed, I had an obligation to let the developer try,” Schartner said Thursday. “I wasn’t trying to push a drive-through; it wasn’t my concept. But I keep thinking, ‘If they see it finished, they will love it.’
“I don’t mean to upset anyone, but they don’t understand I have a huge financial burden at the property and it has to perform.”
The developer — Atlantic’s president is Chuck Anderson — is leading the appeal in Superior Court. Lawyers met with Judge Bennett R. Gallo Wednesday to hash out future court dates.
The united neighbors are chipping in money to pay their lawyer and remain in the fight. Connolly said 30 percent of the battle’s cost, or $750, has been raised from a “50 pay $50” campaign. The opposition’s Facebook supporters continue to grow. One year later: 302 followers.
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