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| Hooked's future home under construction. | |
Hooked, a bookstore, coffee shop and wine bar, will open next April in Lansing, Mich. The business will occupy a 3,000-square-foot ground floor space at 3142 E. Michigan Ave., in the new Red Cedar development.
Co-owner Sarah Reckhow told the Lansing State Journal that long before she and her husband, Matt Grossman, dreamed up a business plan for Hooked, one of the couple's favorite haunts was a San Francisco coffee shop that became a bar at night. "You could scope out a table there with your laptop as a grad student and then stay until the evening and be able to wrap up your day with a glass of wine and go home," she recalled.
Tenured professors at Michigan State University, they have talked about opening a coffee shop/wine bar for years, and in 2019, after a sabbatical in Cambridge, Mass., they added a bookstore to their concept.
Reckhow and Grossmann want to create a space where books, coffee, wine and community intersect. "And we know that we'll have lots of ideas, and some of them won't work out, but we're willing to kind of start a lot of them and see what works, see where communities develop," Grossmann said.
The location made sense "because the development is perfectly positioned between Lansing and East Lansing--two communities from which they want to draw," the State Journal noted. "We wanted it to be a mixture of Lansing and East Lansing," Grossmann said.
Reckhow added: "We really did like the fact that the space sort of physically embodies what we're hoping to accomplish in terms of bridging the university community and Lansing. It just is right in that sweet spot and really accessible from the East Lansing campus."
She also noted that the growing number of independent bookstores in Greater Lansing is exciting: "I think it speaks to the fact that people want to buy their books locally and connect with communities locally, where the owners are local, where you're getting books that might be kind of thought about in terms of, what do people in this community want to read?"
Christine Bennett, co-owner of A Novel Concept, one of five bookstores that have opened along a mile-long stretch on Washington Avenue and Washington Square within the past year, agreed: "The fact that a lot of creative folks were recognizing the need for that and filling that void I think is really cool." Shop owners along what they're calling "Lansing's Bookshop Row" will host a book crawl this Saturday.