A little over a year ago, fiancés Max Bramer and Emily Quinlan were walking around the Skyland neighborhood with friends when they came across the vacant building that was formerly home to Frank’s Food Mart.
Immediately, the vision for 2800 Madison Street began to form.
“That day I reached out to the realtor,” Bramer said.
Today, that vision is mere months away from completion. Soon, Bramer and Quinlan will open The Corner On Madison, a grocery store, liquor shop and neighborhood cafe.
And Skyland has high hopes for the venture, with many neighbors saying it will make the community more walkable and provide a much-needed third space.
Skyland and the surrounding neighborhood lack a walkable grocery store.
Not even 10 years ago, Skyland actually had two decades-old independent grocers. Ben’s Supermarket closed in 2020 and became the Ephemeral Rotating Taproom, and Frank’s Food Mart closed in 2017.
Both stores employed local residents, like Lawren Charles Cary, a sixth-generation Skylander who worked at Frank’s when he was 13. He said he’s watched many of the neighborhood’s small businesses close their doors.
“We have no stores at all. They closed off all of the little family markets that we had. We had plenty of 'em. We had Frank's, we had Ben's, we had Downing Supermarket,” Cary said. “And now everything's gone.”
Today, neighbors have to drive or take public transit to get to a store that sells fresh produce, meat and dairy products. The two closest ones, Spinelli’s Market in Park Hill and Park Hill Supermarket in Clayton, are over a mile away and are across two major roadways — MLK Jr. Boulevard and Colorado Boulevard.
“I ... just have to take a bus, which would kind of suck because that means I'm sinking like what would normally be a half an hour,” said Jeremy Baumeister, a Skyland resident who doesn’t own a car.
Bramer and Quinlan live across Colorado Boulevard in Northeast Park Hill, so they’re familiar with the lack of nearby big-box grocery stores in the area. And as they began exploring the possibility of opening a grocery store in the area, they heard about the deep need for someone to fill the gap left behind by Ben’s and Frank’s.
“Even as we started this process and were visiting the market, I think the biggest tell for us was people were coming up to us, crossing the street, stopping their cars, asking, ‘Is this place going to open? What is it going to be? When is it going to be open?’ even before we had signed any lease,” Quinlan said.
When The Corner opens later this year (the owners have set an aspirational goal of April), they said neighbors will be able to walk, drive or bike to get basic groceries in addition to a selection of household necessities and alcohol. They also plan to open a European-style cafe and bar with prepackaged meals inside the grocery. On top of there being no grocery stores in the neighborhood, there are also only a handful of places to eat.
While neither has worked in the grocery industry, they said both of their careers have translatable skills that they hope will aid them in the first few months of operating. Quinlan has worked in nonprofits and community development, while Bramer has experience managing operations for a global company.
“It's all there,” Bramer said. “It's just we’ve got to tweak it for our new world.”
Meeting Skyland’s needs.
By statistical definition, Skyland is an average neighborhood. The average annual household income ($115,000) are about the same as the citywide average, its poverty rate (8 percent) is about the same, too, and housing values ($643,000) are pretty middle-of-the-road.
That means the neighborhood is relatively diverse — there isn’t a dominant population group, which means The Corner on Madison will have to cater to all people, even on yogurt.
“We will have a more budget-friendly option like the Yoplaits of the world, and we will then have a more premium option like Fage, for example, and we'll kind of let the customer choose their own adventure on that front,” Bramer said.
Once they get things going, they think they can also function as a community space for lowkey gatherings, like simple coffee dates or book clubs — something neighbors are in support of.
Skyland residents at its registered neighborhood organization meeting Tuesday night said the neighborhood is in desperate need of more commercial space where folks can gather. The need was made evident by the fact that they were holding their meetings in the bordering Whittier neighborhood.
“At that stage, we want to see the commercial space in our neighborhood utilized for third space and for the necessities that we rely upon,” said Natasha Myers, the president of the Skyland Neighborhood Association.
The Corner on Madison may very well bring more commercial tenants to their side of the neighborhood. Bramer and Quinlan said they’ve heard rumblings of a restaurant opening in the vacant laundromat next door, and one person at the Skyland Neighborhood Association said he’s thinking of opening a lunch joint just a few doors down.
