There is a half-mile strip of road in St. Petersburg where local businesses have continued to thrive despite the challenges of 2020.
Lori Bishop opened her shop on Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Street North in June of 2019. Her cafe, Blush Tea and Coffee, joined almost 30 other businesses that line the strip between 30 Avenue North and 22 Avenue North.
“To be very honest, I wanted to be downtown,” said Bishop, a first-time business owner.
To her, being at the center of the city seemed like the ideal for a new cafe combining tea, coffee and comfort. After a long, unsuccessful period of hoping for an affordable spot to open up, she turned instead to M.L.K., also known as Ninth Street North.
She spent time scoping out the spaces on the road, checking out the surroundings of a particularly promising vacancy that Wilson’s Books had previously occupied since 1974. She realized it was surrounded by residences, and people regularly walked from business to business.
She noticed that, despite running parallel to Fourth Street North, one of the busiest through streets of the city, M.L.K. wasn’t congested with traffic or lined with fast food restaurants.
“It’s surrounded by all of these beautiful neighborhoods,” Bishop said about her shop’s location. “These are people’s homes just across the street.”
That network of neighbors is what made Bishop excited to open her shop on M.L.K., there’s another side to the community – the tight-knit support between the businesses themselves.
The variety of shops on M.L.K. include laundromats, hair salons, mechanics, restaurants, cafes and pet shops. It even has its own non-chain grocery store, Rollin’ Oats, which opened in 1994 and has grown to encompass over 15,000 square feet and offers “community workshops.” They also sell homemade dog treats made by Krista Schmidt, who happens to be the owner of St.PetersBARK!, a natural pet market with it’s own location just a few buildings down.
“Being in this central location with all these other local businesses that also have this same sense of community, it’s just really awesome and we’re always working with each other,” said April Morningstar, who has worked at St. PetersBARK! for just over a year. She’s a St. Petersburg local who started coming to the natural pet market for it’s selection of raw foods after it opened in 2014.
When she joined ‘the pack’ at the pet store, she realized how closely all the local businesses worked together. The owners all text, call, email or reach out over social media to arrange events and ask for advice. Sometimes, her boss will buy gift cards from the nearby stores to help keep money flowing.
“We are very fortunate and very happy to have the little cove that we’re in, with all the different businesses on the strip that are all flourishing,” said Alexis Chavez, another pack member at St. PetersBARK!
To Morningstar, the shop builds a sense of community by being focused on helping pet-owners and their animals. She says the regulars who come in with their leashed dogs (and harnessed cats, and even harnessed rabbits) know that the shop cares about them, and their customers have shown their care in return.
“Especially with this whole pandemic that has hit, St. Pete has really, just, like, come through in terms of community,” said Morningstar. “All of our customers were doing everything that they could to try and support us… to the point where we were almost selling out of stuff.”
The businesses on M.L.K. tried to show that support back to their customers. Both St. PetersBARK! and Blush Tea and Coffee were spurred by the pandemic to improve their websites, launch online shopping, begin curb-side pickup and even, in the pet store’s case, start providing local delivery.
“We truly love our customers,” said Bishop, who works almost every day in her cafe. “We offered all of those different options for their comfort, and however we needed to make that happen, that’s what we did. That’s what keeps people coming.”
