"How fun would it be if every business you went to was owned by one of your friends?" Cole Hoppe asked himself that while running a coffee trailer around Sun Prairie with his business partner, Savannah Spannagel. Now the answer sits at 107 W. Main St., in brick and glass instead of a parking lot: Jinx Coffee Co., their first permanent cafe, named for Spannagel's Maine Coon cat.
Walk fifty feet east and there's an ice cream shop scooping cones by noon on a Thursday. Walk a few doors past that and a bookstore's bell chimes over the register. Cross the street to Bristol and a sports bar fills up for Saturday football specials. Most of it independently owned. Most of it new within the past year or so. All of it packed into one small stretch of downtown that sits directly across the street from a lot that's still waiting on its own rebuild.
That's the thing worth knowing if you already live here and haven't connected the dots: this same corner is where a 2018 gas explosion killed Sun Prairie firefighter Cory Barr and destroyed the Barr House, the bar and restaurant he ran there with his wife, Abby. The actual footprint of that explosion sits across the street from the new storefronts, and as of this summer a planned hotel for that lot still hadn't turned into anything visible from the sidewalk. Meanwhile the building facing it filled in fast. That didn't happen by accident. It happened because the people building here chose to build next to each other on purpose.
Two Timelines on the Same Corner
For years after the explosion, the lot where it happened sat behind construction fencing while insurance, cleanup, and planning worked themselves out. That process is still not finished. Across the street, though, a different project moved faster: the Monarch on Main, a $24 million, 93-unit apartment building that opened last year with about 11,000 square feet of ground-floor commercial space built in from the start. That commercial footprint, finished and ready for tenants, is what made this year's run of openings possible. Instead of waiting on individual vacancies to fill one at a time, three storefronts could open within steps of each other on a block designed to hold retail from day one.
A Bookstore, Then Coffee, Then Ice Cream
Prairie Pages, an independent bookstore, was one of the first tenants to move into the Monarch on Main not long after the building opened last year. Jinx Coffee Co. followed within months. Founders Savannah Spannagel and Cole Hoppe had spent less than two years running Jinx as a mobile trailer, working high-traffic spots around the Madison area before construction started on a permanent cafe in August 2025. By early winter the shop was open at 107 W. Main, serving drinks named after their pets and selling stickers from local artist Melissa McDowell, who they met while parked outside Felly's Flowers.
Then, this past June, Asteria Ice Cream & Soda opened at 111 W. Main, between Jinx and the bookstore. The owners, Ti and Jeff Gauger, aren't newcomers. They've run Beans n Cream Coffee in downtown Sun Prairie for more than two decades, with locations now in Sun Prairie, DeForest, and at UW Health East Madison Hospital. For Asteria, they consulted a James Beard Award-winning ice cream maker in New Hampshire to develop recipes, and they're sourcing dairy from Sassy Cow Creamery and grain from Heartland Craft Grains in Lodi, with vanilla beans coming from a small farmer in Hawaii. Their term for the approach is "evolved nostalgia," classic flavors built with more deliberate ingredients than the phrase "ice cream parlor" usually implies.
For anyone keeping track of exactly where things sit:
- Prairie Pages, ground floor of the Monarch on Main, opened last year
- Jinx Coffee Co., 107 W. Main St., open since late 2025
- Asteria Ice Cream & Soda, 111 W. Main St., opened this past June
Three storefronts, one short walk, filled in within about a year of each other.
Built Next Door on Purpose
The Gaugers didn't pick 111 W. Main because it was simply available. Jeff Gauger has said he sees a real synergy between the businesses on that stretch, the bookstore on one side, the growing Main Street restaurant scene on the other. That's a different logic than a chain picking a location off a demographic report. It's two people who've run a coffee shop in this town for 22 years choosing to open their second concept next to a bookstore because they think customers will move between the two.
The same logic shows up at Jinx. Hoppe's stated goal wasn't just to sell coffee, it was to build a shop full of collaborations with people they already knew, starting with McDowell's stickers on the counter. Both businesses describe the same instinct in different words: don't just fill a vacant storefront, build next to people you'd want your customers to also visit.
A Block Away on Bristol
The corridor doesn't stop at Main Street. A short walk down Bristol, NOB, short for Neighbors on Bristol, describes itself as offering a taste of the East Coast with a twist of Sun Prairie niceness, and runs game-day specials on Saturdays and Sundays during NCAA and NFL seasons. It isn't one of this year's new arrivals, but it extends the same walkable cluster past Main Street and onto Bristol, giving the corridor a place to watch a game within a block of dessert.
Put together, that means someone spending a Saturday downtown can now start with coffee at Jinx, get ice cream at Asteria, browse at Prairie Pages, and end the day watching football at NOB, all without moving a car.
Fall Fun Turns the Corner Into a Festival
Downtown Sun Prairie's annual Fall Fun festival returns in mid-October, organized by the Downtown Sun Prairie Business Improvement District, with the Saturday Farmers Market in Cannery Square running extended hours, a pie baking contest, horse-drawn wagon rides between Cannery Square and Angell Park, and storefront promotions up and down Main Street from regulars like Beans n Cream Coffeehouse, Glass Nickel Pizza Co., Faded Roots Boutique, Nitty Gritty, Nest Interior Design, and the Sun Prairie Historical Museum.
Last year's Fall Fun listing still had to route around the gap on Main and Bristol. Its schedule pointed people to an "Artisan Market & Jinx Coffee Truck" at Faded Roots Boutique, because the storefront on Main didn't exist yet and the truck was still doing the work. This year, that same coffee is poured from a permanent counter two doors down from a scoop shop that didn't exist at all twelve months ago. If you're walking the festival this October, that corner will be the clearest evidence of how fast this particular block has filled in.
For anyone who's lived here since before 2018, or who just remembers the fencing that sat on that corner for longer than anyone liked, this fall is a good excuse to actually walk it. Grab a coffee, get in line for a scoop, pick up a book, and see what one side of a rebuilt corner looks like while the other side, across the street, is still waiting on its hotel.
If you're the kind of person who pays attention to how a downtown changes block by block, that instinct is worth something beyond curiosity. Browning Real Estate Group works with families across Sun Prairie and the rest of Dane County who care about exactly this kind of detail when they think about where they live. If you're ever curious what that attention to a neighborhood's changes might mean for your own home's value, request a home valuation and we'll walk you through it, no pressure, just an honest look at where things stand.
