Jim Thomas and Robert Cleveland are explaining how they became co-managers of 24:1 Coffee House/Café, which opened at 6730 Page in June.
“At my tender age, I wasn’t going to try and run it by myself,” says the 62-year-old Thomas.
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“Did you say tender? He’s definitely not tender no more,” the 35-year-old Cleveland quips.
The two laugh.
“You get to your sixties, and see how tender you get,” says Thomas.
After spending most of his life in the restaurant industry—most recently as a manager at Clayton’s in O’Fallon, Missouri, alongside Cleveland—Thomas was approached about running a café and coffee shop inside a former auto repair shop in Pagedale.
The idea had come about as part of a larger effort by nonprofit Beyond Housing and the 24:1 Community Land Trust to revitalize the area, comprised of the 24 municipalities that constitute the provisionally accredited Normandy School District. Several years earlier, a series of community meetings had yielded a list of the neighborhood’s needs, and a sit-down restaurant was among the top priorities.
“I liked the idea of the revitalization of the neighborhood,” says Thomas, whose mother lives in the neighborhood. “So it piqued my interest tremendously.”
Thomas brought in Cleveland as well. For the duo, the restaurant offered a unique opportunity: While the community land trust currently owns the operation, they can become the co-owners once the debt on the property and restaurant equipment have been repaid, says Thomas. In the meantime, they oversee the day-to-day operations.
From the nonprofit’s standpoint, it doesn’t “expect immediate return on the investment,” says CLT acquisitions manager Tim Tucker, who also helps the organization with buying and rehabbing homes before selling or renting them at affordable prices. “But over time, we will build the community and interest in the community.”
Across the street from the café, 24:1 Cinema, another product of the land trust, opened in 2015. The organization’s also partnered with the nearby Helping Hand Me Downs, a nonprofit that provides clothing for children. (The land trust also plans to open a second restaurant in Pine Lawn.)
Cleveland, who grew up in nearby University City, says you can see a significant difference in the neighborhood. “People still say, ‘Oh, that’s Pagedale. That’s a high crime area,’” he says. “People don’t really know what’s going on over here until you get someone like me who’s from here and can bring them in. Then they’re like, ‘Wow, I haven’t been over here in years.’”
The restaurant provides the neighborhood with both another dining option and a gathering place. “It’s a great meeting space,” says Tucker. “If you are here in the mornings, you will see people stopping on their way to work.”
Patrons gather around tables made from old chalkboards pulled from vacant school buildings in the area that the trust had either torn down or rehabbed; the tables were then covered with drawings from Normandy students and coated in polyurethane.
Customers choose from a menu that includes a host of healthy dishes and drinks not available elsewhere in the neighborhood: open-faced vegetable sandwiches, pasta primavera, a spinach salmon salad with lemon dill dressing, flavored lattés.
As Cleveland says, “We are giving people a new option.”
