Summer Sketching, Coffeeshops and Urban Renewal

Our summer sketching season is in full swing.  This past Friday we visited Stone Spiral Coffee & Curios, a new stop on the sketching circuit.  The coffee was great, outside and inside were awesome – a very nice place to spend the morning.  It took me a while to find it.  I knew it was on Sutton in Maplewood.  I’m familar with the area of Sutton just south of Manchester Road – there’s a lot of renovation that’s happened there in the past few years.  Stone Spiral is north of Manchester though, in what’s essentially a neighborhood, a couple of blocks from the mercantile zone along Manchester.

We visit a lot of coffee shops in conjunction with our sketching.  This got us thinking: you could probably graph the number and quality of neighborhood coffee shops and compare that to the revitalization of a neighborhood.  The two would track side by side.  I’ll admit I’ve haven’t been to Maplewood lately, but driving around looking for Stone Spiral it was obvious that there’s a lot going on in this area, including more coffee shops to put on the docket for summer sketching.  It’s great to see so many positive things happening in our hometown!