Oak Park, once a dry Detroit suburb, is now attracting breweries Three years after legalizing cocktails, Oak Park eagerly courts alcohol-serving restaurants with 20 liquor licenses available at about $2,100 each

Robert Allen | Detroit Free Press

For decades, you couldn't order a beer in Oak Park.

So when Edward Stencel began looking for a second location for his Royal Oak-based River Rouge Brewing Co., he tried Madison Heights, Hazel Park and Downriver. But not Oak Park.

"The impression is, it's a dry city," said Stencel, 53. "But not anymore."

In summer 2019, his brewery's new location is anticipated to open at 14401 W. 11 Mile Road, a couple of blocks west of Coolidge Highway, in Oak Park. He acquired the property after meeting city officials at a brewers conference in Kalamazoo, which they attended in hopes of recruiting breweries to Oak Park — a city that has never had one.

And city leadership isn't satisfied with just one.

"We hope to attract even more breweries," City Manager Erik Tungate said. "Our credo here is we want to really get into place-making ideas throughout the city."

As Detroit to the south and the Woodward corridor to the east draw more investment to humming downtown areas, Oak Park, population 30,000, is positioning itself to catch the spillover.

The city — which overturned its ban on sales of alcohol by the glass several years ago — is actively trying to shed its reputation as a place you don't go for a drink. And its 20 liquor licenses, available for about $2,100 each, are anticipated to drive renewed interest.

Yes, those numbers are correct — a bargain compared with the $65,000 to $75,000 that restaurateur Curt Catallo said the licenses tend to go for in the area.

City officials also said Oak Park has increasingly been attracting more young residents and families.

"The 20-somethings are discovering Oak Park and loving it," Mayor Marian McClellan said. "Oak Park is open for business now."

The city is actively seeking to attract businesses, including alcohol-serving restaurants and breweries, bolstering its appeal with plans to remove car lanes on 9 Mile Road to make it more bicycle- and pedestrian-friendly, adding an eye-catching sign on the I-696 bridge, and soon, the availability of MoGo bicycle rental kiosks.

"The time has come for the next generation to kind of start digging Oak Park," said Catallo, co-owner of the Union Joints group, which has several "one-of-a kind" area restaurants, including Vinsetta Garage in Royal Oak. He plans to open a restaurant in a renovated, historic WWJ-AM radio transmitter building on 8 Mile, east of Coolidge, in Oak Park.

"My mom grew up in Oak Park and went to Oak Park High — she's from that first generation, when Oak Park was kind of booming as a city suburb," Catallo said. "What you have now is millennials recognizing well-built, post-war homes and good schools in kind of a bustling area that has a lot to offer."

'Bedroom community' defined

McClellan's predecessor says Oak Park has always been a "quiet town."

"The priorities have to be police and fire protection," said Gerald (Jerry) Naftaly, who served as mayor from 1991 to 2011 and as city councilman and mayor pro-tem from 1977 to 1991. "That's where the money should be going, not an effort to attend conventions to lobby for breweries."

Bars and alcohol service in general were prohibited in Oak Park from the 1950s until 2013, when the City Council approved sales of beer and wine by the glass. In 2015, 58 percent of voters OK'd adding liquor drinks to the menus. Packaged alcoholic beverages had always been allowed for sale in the city, but multiple previous attempts for restaurant service over the preceding decades hadn't drawn enough public support.

City officials say an education campaign and the arrival of younger residents has helped make the city more welcoming to such establishments.

Naftaly said he didn't oppose the idea of alcohol by the glass for "upscale restaurants," but he believes voters wouldn't have approved breweries per se.

"It disturbs me when people are drinking to the limit," he said. "If (voters) were bamboozled and told one thing, that we just want upper-scale restaurants, and now it appears (to be) brewpubs and taverns. ... The residents were sold a bill of goods."

McClellan told the Free Press in 2015 that the liquor-by-the-glass proposal was anticipated to attract restaurants such as Applebee's and Olive Garden. The former schoolteacher said last week that voters' shift to support it was a result of education: "It was like educating the public about how we need this, about economic development."

Tungate in 2015 held two town hall meetings explaining that the ordinance would allow alcohol-serving restaurants, but not bars, strip clubs or topless bars. He said last week that breweries are in a separate category.

"First of all, the core business is not a bar or restaurant," he said. "The core business is that they're going to be brewing beer. It's really more of a commercial use. It's my understanding that they would like to include a portion to include a restaurant that would, in fact, serve the beer produced on-site."

Stencel said he plans to have food available, perhaps including food trucks.

"I'm about having a tasting room, not a bar," he said. "I'm about creating an experience like a winery, not a bar. And I operate accordingly, as far as I don't stay open late. The atmosphere is family friendly."

Oak Park Community and Economic Development Director Kimberly Marrone said research as part of the city's development plan process found that as many as 70 percent of Oak Park residents leave the city to go out to dinner.

"That was a big, untapped market," she said.

The city was recently named a certified Redevelopment Ready Community, according to a May news release from the Michigan Economic Development Corporation. The business friendly designation came after assessments on transparency, predictability and efficiency in pursuit of economic development.

"Certification status provides a compelling sign that a community has removed development barriers and streamlined processes to be more competitive and attractive to investors," according to the news release.

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Tungate said the city is "trying to be the very best bedroom community of metro Detroit that we can be. To do that, we have to have offerings for people after they get home from work — and that's easier said than done."

No downtown, just corridors

City leaders' vision for Oak Park isn't to centralize the entertainment options but to add them along commercial corridors and work with neighboring cities such as Ferndale and Berkley.

"We didn't have that pre eminent downtown area," Tungate said.

In fact, the River Rouge brewery and Union Joints restaurant locations are slated to be on opposite borders of the city — north and south, respectively. The streets of 9 Mile, 11 Mile and Greenfield Road are to be among areas of focus for more walkable places where people want to spend time.

The city's place-making efforts — such as a so-called "road diet" along 9 Mile Road, expected to begin in the spring — are intended to make the corridors of homes, low-slung businesses and light-industrial buildings more inviting to pedestrians and cyclists, with pocket parks, a dog park, bike lanes and bike repair shelters among flashes of color from the city's sunflower-planting project.

For an example of a brewery along a non-downtown corridor, you needn't travel more than a mile east of Oak Park: Axle Brewing Co.'s Livernois Tap, which opened in spring 2017 on Livernois Avenue, between 8 Mile and 9 Mile in Ferndale.

It regularly fills on weekends as adults and even families walk, bike or drive there from nearby neighborhoods. Inside, there's a restaurant, with games available to keep kids entertained and bathrooms with baby-changing stations. Also, there's a bike maintenance kiosk out front.

"Oak Park and Hazel Park is where a lot of people are looking who just can't get into Ferndale at this point," Axle Brewing Co. President Dan Riley said. "There's probably an opportunity in some of those industrial corridors. People do a great job with some of those old buildings, you know, old '50s and '60s strip malls."

A number of breweries are clustered in downtowns along Woodward, in and around Detroit's downtown core, and scattered across southeastern Michigan. But Livernois Tap is on the eastern side of a roughly 10-mile brewery gap, several miles wide, with no breweries between Ferndale and Farmington — despite a relatively dense metro population.

Stencel's brewery in Oak Park would make that gap a little smaller.

Royal Kubo owner: 'I hope they fail'

Oak Park's about-face on alcohol may be the most stunning to Armand Santos.

"You can tell those son-of-a-bitches I hope they fail," said Santos, 70.

By 2005, his Royal Kubo karaoke bar and restaurant at 10 Mile and Greenfield had become a big hit. The Free Press in October 1999 described it as "a popular watering hole for the Filipino community, but it's far from an exclusive, ethnocentric club. All ages congregate here, from 50-somethings to teenagers, the latter segregated to the area by the door, nearer the watchful eye of the club's bouncer."

Freep

Local TV and radio personalities, as well as Kid Rock, had sung karaoke there. The bar had been in Royal Oak Township for about 16 years, Santos said, but when the location was annexed into Oak Park, he lost his liquor license and was forced to leave.

The unusual circumstances brought substantial publicity, and the business was moved to Clawson — opening not long before the Great Recession hit. It closed in 2012, Santos said, but he's still paying off the debt.

"It set our retirement back about $1 million," he said. "It used to be worth a lot more than that."

Read more: Hazel Park is Oakland County's newest hot housing market

Today, Santos runs a financial planning business, but he still has strong feelings that he was treated unfairly by Oak Park.

"They screwed me and my family, and my children suffer because of that," Santos said. "Because instead of me leaving them a legacy, I'm leaving them with nothing. The only legacy I can give my kids is diabetes."

Naftaly, who was mayor at the time, said he had hoped for state legislation that would make it possible for Royal Kubo to be able to stay, but that the business moved before anything was passed.

"I thought it would be a good introduction to our residents, that they might see they didn't have anything to fear by having an establishment that had liquor by the glass and also (served food)," Naftaly said. "I only heard positive things from people who went there. They had a good reputation."

Asked about her thoughts on the Royal Kubo situation, McClellan said she has found through economic development research that enhancing suburbs requires a welcoming attitude.

"You need restaurants, you need things that bring the community together to have a nice time — whether it's an event or shopping or something," she said. "You can't just have houses."

This story has been updated to correct the dates that Gerald (Jerry) Naftaly served as mayor of Oak Park.

Contact Robert Allen: Twitter @rallenMI or rallen@freepress.com