Investor Buys House Across From the Park, Opens a Wine Bar in It

A house came up for sale on the north corner of Thrasher Commons in February. Someone bought it. This month it opens as a wine bar.

That sequence of events is not remarkable in most places. In Notcross it is worth writing down, because three years ago it would not have finished.

RagingWine of Notcross occupies the 1908 house at the top of the park, a wraparound-porch property that had been on and off the market for most of a decade. The buyer is a private hospitality operator with no prior connection to the city. The conversion keeps the house — porch, shingles, roofline — and adds a tasting room, a bar, a kitchen and terrace seating on what used to be an overgrown front garden.

The porch, which is the whole point, now seats twenty-six people looking directly at the park.

What the City did

The City's total involvement in this project can be described precisely.

The buyer telephoned Development Services in March to ask what converting a residential property to commercial use would require. Staff sent a written checklist the same day. The buyer telephoned again in April with two questions and received answers that afternoon. The application was submitted in May and approved in June.

That is the entire record.

No rezoning was required — the parcel has been zoned for mixed use since 2011, a fact the City had never had occasion to mention to anyone. No variance was sought. No incentive was requested, which staff note is the first time in living memory that a commercial project of this size has come to Notcross without asking the City for money.

"I keep wanting to claim some of this," the Economic Development Manager said. "I have gone back through the file twice looking for the part where we made it happen. We answered the phone, and then we did not do anything else. That appears to have been sufficient."

The wider picture

The project is the most visible of a pattern the City has been watching for about a year.

Development Services has fielded thirty-one inquiries about commercial conversion or new commercial construction in the downtown district over the past twelve months. The comparable figure for the twelve months ending in early 2024 was two. Both of those went elsewhere.

The City attributes the change to nothing especially clever: permits that issue in days, a published checklist, predictable rules, parking that exists, and a downtown where things are visibly under way. Investors, staff observe, are not looking for enthusiasm. They are looking for a schedule.

"For a long time we sold the vision," the City Manager said. "We had a very good vision. What we did not have was a permit, a parking space or a date. It turns out those three things are the pitch."

The house

Built in 1908 for a railroad family, the house is among the older surviving residences on the park. It is not individually listed, and under the criteria the Historic Preservation Commission is currently drafting it would likely have qualified for review had demolition been proposed.

It was not proposed. The buyer's stated reason was that the porch was the reason to buy the building.

RagingWine of Notcross opens to the public later this month. The terrace faces west, which means it faces the park, which means it faces the sunset. The City would like it on the record that it had nothing to do with that either.