Resident aims to open bookstore with food, coffee and cocktails

By Alice Waugh

Lincoln resident Richard Card wants to open a combination bookstore, coffee shop, and wine and cocktail bar in the South Lincoln business district that would offer “an ambience that promotes higher-minded conversations,” he says.

“Blazes” will also offer a breakfast, lunch and light dinner menu, said Card, who is aiming for a “salon atmosphere.” The bookstore component of Blazes will be relatively small—about 350 linear feet—and will stock “only high-minded and literary works,” he said. “It just seems to me that the thing that we need in Lincoln is a place for like-minded people to congregate. We have such great people here in town and there seems to be few places to gather to celebrate that ‘Lincoln-ness’.”

Card has not finalized exactly where Blazes would be located, although he is eyeing property at 10 Lewis St., which is owned and occupied by the Food Project.

“He has contacted us preliminarily, but that’s all I can tell you right now,” said Paula Wirts, director of finance, human resources, and operations at the Food Project. “From plans he showed me, it would be possible” to house both her organization and Blazes in the same building, she said.

Card is a fiction writer, poet and essayist with a background in 19th-century American literature. He also worked at Bose Corp. as a technical writer until a recent round of layoffs.

Residents will be asked at Town Meeting (warrant article 43) on Saturday if they support a liquor license for Blazes even though its location has not yet been finalized. If the article passes, the Board of Selectmen would then petition the state for legislation to allow the permit. The selectmen would then have to grant the license and the Planning Board would have to approve Card’s site plan.

And that’s not all. Currently, town zoning rules allow restaurants but not retail stores on Lewis Street—but Town Meeting warrant article 37 seeks to expand the permitted uses to encourage more businesses in the area.

“He still has a lot of legwork to do between point A and point B,” said Board of Selectmen chair Renel Fredriksen. The board discussed the matter at its March 23 meeting, though it did not take a position vote.

Card does not see the Whistle Stop or Aka Bistro as competition for his business which he said would be “bridging the gap between those two.” Blazes would not be a “higher-end coffee shop” rather than a sandwich shop—”more of a supplemental institution, he said.

Since the process of obtaining a liquor license is lengthy, Card hopes to open Blazes late next fall and add cocktails to its offerings later. If he is successful in obtaining the license, his establishment would join Donelan’s, Aka Bistro, The Commons, and the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park as Lincoln organizations that are permitted to sell or serve alcohol on an ongoing basis.