A partnership between three local residents is bringing the building at the corner of West Downer Place and Stolp Avenue in downtown Aurora back to life.

The trio of Mike Mancuso, owner of The Yetee, the popular tee-shirt printing company, along with Marcus and Jenni Contaldo of Modest Coffee are working to reinvent the space into a combination of a coffee shop, pie stop, art gallery and arcade called Public Access.

“We really wanted to create a place where people want to hang out,” Jenni Contaldo said. “We wanted to create the kind of business that we would want to go to ourselves.”

Public Access was originally scheduled to open in February 2017. But unanticipated structural issues with the building have delayed the debut for a couple of months.

The Contaldos have been interested in opening a coffee shop in downtown Aurora for some time.

The husband and wife team started their coffee business three years ago after years of roasting coffee as a hobby.

About the same time, Mancuso turned part of the warehouse that he leases for The Yetee into an art gallery that featured rotating local and regional artists.

But the success of his online tee-shirt business made it more difficult for Mancuso to dedicate space for the art gallery shows.

About a year ago, he also began to buy coffee from the Modest Coffee—the Contaldo’s business.

“First he began to buy coffee for his office from us and then he began to sell it on his website,” Jenni Contaldo said.

Mancuso who had been interested in opening a separate art gallery approached the two to see if they would be interested in “teaming up” to open a business together.

“Our thought was that the art gallery would bring people in to support the cafe and the cafe would bring people in to support the art gallery,” Contaldo said.

The timing worked out for all three.

“We first thought we were going to keep it simple; just coffee and artwork,” Jenni Contaldo said.

However through the planning process and talking to Aurora community members, other ideas came to the forefront and the concept for the business expanded.

Some expressed interest in having arcade games and a recently passed ordinance in Aurora permiting restaurants to serve beer and wine during certain hours—if they had food available for purchase—led the group to decide selling pies.

By breaking the connecting wall between the One Downer Place building and the L-shaped building directly to the north, Public Access will combine the two spaces and use the L-shape building to house 15 to 20 arcade games.

“We will be changing out the video games and pinball machines,” she added.

While the trio mulls over serving beer and wine for now, Contaldo said, Public Access will be serving sweet pies, breakfast pies, and empanada style pies for appetizers.

In addition to selling brewing equipment for coffee enthusiasts, Public Access also will offer specialty-grade roasted coffee.

“Specialty-grade coffee is definitely more seasonal than commodity coffee, so we buy our coffee from whatever region is in season,” she said. “However, we do buy a lot of coffee from South America, Central America, Mexico, and Ethiopia.”

When purchasing coffee, Modest Coffee uses a formula that considers taste as well as human and social standards.

Modest Coffee also operates a coffee shop inside the Sugar Grove Library as well as roasting coffee which is sold as single bags or through an online subscription service.

Producing great coffee and treating coffee as an experience is very important to us, Contaldo said.