Attach:Tommy1.jpg Δ Tommy Fello started Tommy’s Restaurant on Coventry 30 years ago, and despite the ups and downs of the street, the place has remained as popular as ever. On a recent Monday night visit to the local fave, the hopping shop, which is famous for its inexpensive, healthy and original food, was half-packed. The impressive assortment of patrons included funky teens sporting piercings, soccer moms munching on hummus, gay couples sipping tea and Grog Shop devotees hanging out before the show. With its tasty falafels, spinach pies and milkshakes, speedy service and the people-watching from its street-level windows, Tommy’s is a recipe for a successful, independent café.

Tommy himself has relentlessly volunteered his time for Coventry. As President of the Coventry Special Improvement District, a merchants group whose owners pay a tax to finance district-wide improvements, he spearheaded a successful effort to turn Cleveland Heights’ plan to re-surface the street into a more ambitious effort to re-develop Coventry itself. The involvement of the SID added handsome new planters, lampposts and other amenities to the mix, and the merchants plan to celebrate with a re-opening party this summer. We asked Tommy Fello about the funny names for his sandwiches, the redevelopment of the street, whether Coventry is still cool, and this summer’s return of the Street Fair.

Tommy’s restaurant has been on Coventry for 30 years, so you’ve seen a lot of history here. With the opening of Legacy Village and other shopping centers, there must be a lot of challenges facing independent retail districts. What are you and other merchants doing about this?
We’ve been working on the redevelopment of Coventry Road; this recent influx of dollars and dreams has been two years of work. The overall goal is to make Coventry more competitive. We have a quarter mile business district with 300 employees, and we need different kinds of retail to complement the restaurants that are already here. We made a list of things that we need to keep the district viable. The population in Northeast Ohio has only increased two percent in recent years and there’s been a downturn in the economy, so people are going out less. Despite this, there are more restaurants than ever. To compensate for it, we have to make our business district the best we can; our businesses should feed off each other to make the district better. We’d like to add soft goods; this is a need that has been identified.

Coventry Road has a Special Improvement District – all of the property owners pay a special assessment tax, and this in turn funds the SID, which helps with business promotion. How does the SID work? What has it accomplished?
The merchants association came before the Special Improvement District. When we first started, we had a working budget of only $6K-7K per year. The businesses paid dues, but it was not mandatory. In the ‘80s, the City of Cleveland Heights formed the Coventry Village Development Corporation, which had a budget of about $20K per year. When the city saw that federal and state dollars were drying up, they organized the merchants to form a SID. Times Square in New York City is probably the best known SID in the country – and they have a budget of something like $5 million per year. We’re the smallest SID in the State of Ohio, with seventeen property owners and fifty businesses. Advantages of a SID are that property owners and businesses can design their own district. We started our SID in 1996 with $70K. We had to get 65% of property owners to approve a special tax; instead we got 71 percent to support it! I’ve been working on the street since 1962, and I’d never seen some of these owners until this point. When their money was on the table, they started to show up. With a SID, every property owner has to pay, so everyone pays their fair share. The SID brought new owners in, and they brought new ideas. The SID taxes property owners. It comes to a low of 23 cents per square foot, and a high of 75 cents per square foot. This cost is usually passed on to the tenant in the form of a triple net lease. So there is an incentive for merchants to get involved, even if they’re not the property owners. When we went back for approval after five years, 82 percent of the owners voted for it, and we increased our budget to $100K and set up our by-laws so that the SID has to get re-approved every five years.

Coventry is known for its small, local businesses. Does the price per square foot of retail space on the street keep entrepreneurs from getting a foot in the door?
Property values have gone out the ceiling. A building had sold previously for $360,000 just recently sold for $1.4 million. The price per square foot went from $4 per square foot to $12 per square foot during the 1990’s. Now, you’re lucky if you can get space for less than $14 per square foot, and it’s up to $28 per square foot at the south end of the street where the theater is. So it’s hard for mom and pop stores to open up. Some other districts are creating incubator space for new retail, and as the businesses get stronger, they open up a larger space. We’d like to do this - a big challenge is that our spaces are too small for larger chains, and too big for small entrepreneurs. Chain stores have to be a part of the mix – we can’t insist that the chains not come, because it’s dollar-driven, but we have to make sure that the mom and pops survive, too. The SID can request or suggest, but we cannot force the owners not to bring tenants in. For instance, I didn’t think that the laundromat on Mayfield was a good business to have at the Gateway to our district, but the owner had to fill the space – he couldn’t afford to have it empty. Currently, we are working on purchasing a building so that the SID can have an income stream, and some control over the tenant mix.

Another problem that we have is that the theater building is now vacant. The previous owner bought the building for $240,000 and put $2 million into it. You might say that he built a Rolls Royce when all he needed was a Chevrolet. No independent theater operator could afford to be there. Yet it also failed because it wasn’t marketed properly. It was operated by Madstone Theaters of New York, a company that owns successful restaurant theaters around the country. But the owner didn’t become a part of the neighborhood.
So the corporate chains have moved in, but there are still a lot of smaller, local businesses. Do you think the “feel” of Coventry as a funky, local district is still here?
I think so. But we need to support local businesses – people don’t realize that small, independent businesses are the backbone of our nation’s economy. They shop at chain stores to save money. But you can have all the Walmarts that you want, and they’ll never do what local businesses do for our neighborhoods. At the same time, we can’t have all independent businesses on the street, because then we won’t have a viable street.

Attach:Tommy2.jpg ΔWhat’s happening with the vacant retail spaces on Coventry?

A new store called La Madre is opening up where the Food Co-op was. It will sell fresh meats, fish and vegetables, and also foods prepared by the people that work there. This is a service that we need on Coventry. We are close to signing a lease with a retail establishment that will occupy the space where the Wilderness Shop was. That space is owned by Montlack Management. Much to Ken Montlack’s credit [Cleveland Heights Councilperson], he could have had a restaurant there, but he listened to the needs of the special district, and swallowed money for two years to get the right tenant. The space where the Grog Shop used to be will stay empty until the upstairs has been finished [Mayfield/Coventry]. A store called Goodies that will sell gelato and baked goods will open up where the optical place was [next to Vidstar at Hamphire/Coventry]. And there’s going to be an art gallery next to Mc Nulty?’s [formerly Panini’s].

'''That’s an interesting case right there. Rather than independent businesses getting bought out by chains, Mc Nulty?’s used to be Panini’s until it broke off and went independent.
You’re right. And there’s the Loft, which used to be BW-3. The owners paid their franchise fees long enough, and they decided that they had enough business to go out on their own. Small businesses are fickle and I’ve read that six out of ten restaurants close within the first two years. A good business really has to know the neighborhood, the market and the product. As for the other spaces, there’s going to be a hair salon where the Free Times was, and Herb Aschmerman Photography is coming back. We’ve been trying to get chains that fit with Coventry, such as Urban Outfitters and Trader Joe’s, but so far they haven’t come because the spaces are too small. Trader Joe’s opened up a store in Woodmere instead.

What about the redevelopment of Coventry Road – the dust has settled and you’ve got a re-opening party planned for this summer. How did the SID become involved? Did your group influence the plan and design, and if so, how?
The redevelopment of the road came up almost in passing in a conversation with the Mayor and City Manager of Cleveland Heights. They called to talk about the theater and said, ‘By the way, we’re going to be re-doing the street’. When they re-did Lee Road in the Cedar-Lee district, they left the sidewalks that the city does not own the way that they were. But we were organized and ready for this opportunity, and to the city’s credit, they wanted the merchants to be a part of it. We were able to get money from NOACA and the Ohio Department of Transportation. As a result of our involvement, we were able to get planters, new outdoor electrical systems, an irrigation system, benches, and we’re going to install a kiosk and a clock. None of this would have happened without the SID.

Coventry has always been a pedestrian-friendly street. Did you try to enhance this with the redevelopment?
The problem with the crosswalks previously is that they didn’t always work. At least a few times per summer, some kid or older person would almost get killed there. One of the things on our wish list was to make the street more pedestrian-friendly. So we created the ‘bump out’ at Lancashire, and narrowed the 67 foot crosswalk to 40 feet. We also tried to match the crosswalks with the pattern of where people crossed the street naturally. One of the owners on the street suggested that we look into the crosswalks that light up automatically, which he’d seen in other cities. The city manager investigated this, and that’s what we decided to do.

I've heard you’re bringing the street fairs back.
We’ll have three mini street fairs over the course of the summer. The street fairs got started in the first place to attract families to come back down to Coventry. Fr a while, there were a lot of motorcycle guys that hung out on the street. This was in the ‘70’s. We had a guy whose nickname was Beetle Bailey, and he used to come in here and order to same thing every day, so eventually we named it after him – we call it the Beetle Omelette. Most of our food was invented by or named after our customers. Beetle worked at a leather shop and was a Hell’s Angel. He was a very nice guy, but he was a Hell’s Angel, and his friends were crazy. He was actually killed the same way that they guys in that movie ‘Easy Rider’ were killed – someone shot him on the highway while he was riding his motorcycle. But we started the street fairs to bring families back to Coventry. The return of the fair this summer will be a renaissance of the things that Coventry was, and what it will be. That’s why this street got started – people could come down and find one-of-a-kind things here.

Do you think the SID’s being formed at Cedar-Fairmount and Cedar-Lee in Cleveland Heights will help these districts? Do you see an opportunity for others to emulate the success of Coventry?
It’s smart that these districts formed SID’s, and that this was really an overdue movie but I’m not sure they allocated enough budget dollars. I know we struggled with a $70K budget, because to be successful, we needed a full time Director with a decent salary. The Cedar-Lee district is larger than we are, but I think they only have a budget of $75K. I hope we can share some of our failures with them, so they don’t have to make the same mistakes. Of course we’re competitive with one another, but we’re all trying to make Cleveland Heights a better place for business. And there are areas where joining together will probably give us a bigger bang for our buck.

Do you find that it’s difficult to compete with larger malls such as Severance or Legacy Village? Has the development of outer suburban malls hurt your business?
If Coventry cannot fill the service needs of our customers, then the big box stores will. That’s why we need to get more services and soft goods on the street. I know that hardware stores in Cleveland Heights – and there’s one on Coventry – have gotten slammed by Walmart. I won’t shop at ‘Lunacy Village’ myself!

What continues to excite you about running a restaurant on Coventry? Did you ever think about leaving? What about franchising and opening in another community, such as Lakewood or Cleveland?
I’ve been working on the street since I was 14. My first job here was as a soda jerk in the drugstore. I don’t really want to open another store – my heart and soul is on Coventry. I have 56 employees, and they all do a great job. Our menu was written by our customers, so we created most of our foods by accident. The Uncle Gay sandwich was created for a guy named Jack Struby. Jack was a window dresser for the merchants on the street, and he was one of the first openly gay people on Coventry. I had an Aunt Gay, and I had named a sandwich after her, and he said to me one day, ‘If you have an Aunt Gay then you have to have an Uncle Gay’. We have people around the world, customers and people who'vee worked here and we stay in touch. Now taht I've become successful as a result of this district, I want to give back to set an example for others. Hopefully, I can be a mentor.

Interview by Lee Chilcote
Photos by Mulready

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