Stand at the corner of Main and Bristol on a Saturday morning and you will watch the same choreography repeat itself every ten minutes or so. Someone walks out of Jinx Coffee Co. with a latte, cuts past the window of Prairie Pages, and either turns toward the pottery studio next door or keeps going toward the ice cream counter at Asteria. None of it looks unusual. It looks like a normal downtown block doing normal downtown things.
What most people walking that block do not stop to think about is that eight years ago, this exact ground was gone.
What Was Actually Here Before
On July 10, 2018, a ruptured natural gas line caused an explosion at the corner of Main and Bristol that leveled the Glass Nickel Pizza building, the Barr House Tavern, and the former Watertower Chophouse, and killed Sun Prairie Fire Department Capt. Cory Barr. It is the kind of event a town does not talk about casually, and this piece is not the place to relitigate that day. What matters for understanding the block as it exists now is what happened to the ground itself once the rubble was cleared.
Glass Nickel Pizza did not return to its old address. Owner Adam Bougie relocated two blocks away and eventually built a new home for the restaurant, the Bougie Building at 410 E. Main St., which opened with nine apartments above the dining room in 2022. That was one recovery story, and it played out somewhere else entirely.
The original corner took years to redevelop while the city worked through what to do with a property large enough to support something bigger than a single restaurant. A $250,000 grant from the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation helped move the process along, and the site eventually became Monarch on Main, a $24 million mixed-use building with 93 apartments over roughly 11,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space built on the footprint of the buildings the explosion destroyed.
The Building Filled In, One Storefront at a Time
Here is the part that a quick drive down Main Street won't tell you. Monarch on Main did not open with a ribbon-cutting for a single anchor tenant the way a lot of new downtown developments do. It filled in slowly, storefront by storefront, over roughly a year and a half, and every business that took space there is independently owned by people who had no connection to whatever stood on that corner before 2018.
Prairie Pages, an independent bookstore, and Dongzhu Pottery moved into the ground floor early, giving the building its first foot traffic. Then, in November 2025, Jinx Coffee Co. opened at 107 W. Main St. Savannah Spannagel and Cole Hoppe had started Jinx less than a year earlier as a mobile coffee trailer working corporate sites and private events across the Madison area. Before Jinx opened at the address, the two leased space at Monarch on Main for its permanent cafe.
"How fun would it be if every business you went to was owned by one of your friends? In my opinion, that'd be super fun," Hoppe told the Cap Times about the shop's approach to hospitality.
Seven months after Jinx opened, in June 2026, Asteria Ice Cream & Soda took the storefront next door, sandwiched between Jinx and Prairie Pages. The shop belongs to Ti and Jeff Gauger, who already run Beans n Cream Coffee at four locations around the area, including one in DeForest and one inside UW Health East Madison Hospital. Asteria was a deliberate departure from their existing brand, built around house-made ice cream, seasonal flavors, and dirty-soda riffs the Gaugers call magic sodas.
That is four separate businesses, four separate owners, filling in one building over roughly eighteen months, on the exact footprint where Glass Nickel Pizza and its neighbors used to stand.
Why That Sequencing Matters More Than It Looks Like It Should
A single big anchor tenant moving into a rebuilt corner is one possible pattern. Here, four unrelated small businesses filled in that same corner, one at a time, over a year and a half—a different pattern of recovery.
Jinx spent nearly a year building a following as a trailer before opening a storefront. The Gaugers already had four coffee shops running, and Asteria brought an entirely new concept, ice cream instead of coffee, to this same block. Jinx and Asteria occupy neighboring storefronts.
That is a more durable kind of recovery than a single new restaurant reopening under its old name would have been. One tenant leaving would have been a headline. Four independent leases signed across eighteen months is a pattern, and patterns are harder to undo.
What the Block Actually Offers Right Now
If you're putting together a Saturday that starts and ends on this corner, here is what's actually there:
- Jinx Coffee Co., 107 W. Main St. Open daily from morning through mid-afternoon. The menu leans into the owners' pets for its naming, with the Jinx Latte (white chocolate, hazelnut, smoked salt) and the Cat Nip Matcha among the regulars.
- Asteria Ice Cream & Soda, 111 W. Main St., between Jinx and Prairie Pages. Currently open Thursday and Sunday from noon to 8 p.m., and Friday and Saturday until 10 p.m. Flavors rotate seasonally alongside permanent staples like the Gaugers' calico coffee scoop, built on salted caramel cold brew and fudge ribbons.
- Prairie Pages, the independent bookstore that gave the building some of its earliest steady traffic.
- Dongzhu Pottery, the working studio next door.
None of these four businesses existed on this block before 2018. None of them are trying to be what was there before. That is worth sitting with for a second, because it means the corner's recovery was never about restoring what Sun Prairie lost. It was about proving the block could still support new commerce, and four different businesses now occupy the site.
The Quiet Version of a Comeback Story
Sun Prairie doesn't need a plaque on this corner explaining what used to be here, and this piece isn't suggesting it should get one. The building does its own quiet explaining. A coffee shop that started in a parking lot, a bookstore that held down the block while the rest of it filled in, a pottery studio, and an ice cream counter that used to just be an idea two coffee shop owners had on the side. That's the whole story, and it's a better one than a single restaurant reopening under its old sign would have been.
If you're the kind of person who tracks what's actually happening on the ground in Sun Prairie, block by block, rather than the version that shows up in a press release, that instinct is exactly what makes a good neighbor and, eventually, a good client. I'm Josh Brost with CORE Collective Realty, and I spend as much time walking these downtowns as I do pulling comps. If you want to talk about what's happening in Sun Prairie or anywhere else in the Madison area, Let's Connect.
