A year-and-a-half after opening a restaurant and bar at the corner of Brookfield and Hollywood avenues in Brookfield, the owners of The Station have decided to call it quits. Despite a loyal clientele and uniformly good reviews about the food and atmosphere, Vincent Gonzales and Yvonne Nelson let the business’ liquor license lapse on Dec. 31 and Gonzales confirmed last week that the restaurant was closing.
“We did everything in our means,” said Gonzales. “We made it personable and had a decent product, but the economy is terrible.
“It’s a tough thing. We had a lot invested here and really like the area. The people here are fantastic.”
The Station opened in June 2008 at 8420 Brookfield Ave., which from 2003 to 2006 was home to The Paw/Cyberdog Café, an experimental restaurant/vocational training program run by Riverside-Brookfield High School.
Gonzales said he had hoped the restaurant would draw customers from nearby Riverside-Brookfield High School and commuters going to and from the Hollywood/Brookfield Zoo Metra station across the street, but it never happened.
“When we first got into it, we hoped the train and the school would bring business,” he said. “We thought kids would be in here after school, but it never panned out. And the people coming to and from the train would come in and buy a bottle of water or a pop.”
The fact that The Station was located next door to another bar and grill, Johnny B’s, wasn’t so much of a factor, Gonzales said, since each place had its own clientele. What he hoped is that the two businesses might help each other gain new customers.
“I hoped to complement them and thought we’d get some other folks to eat here,” Gonzales said. “Look at Madison Street [in Forest Park]. I was hoping we could complement one another. Actually, we have two different types of clientele anyway.”
Gonzales said that he and Nelson are interested in exploring opening another establishment.
“I definitely would like to,” Gonzales said. “The customers we do have are loyal and real nice people. I’d like to keep that going. I have kids that go to school in town, so I’d like to remain in the area.”
Asked if there were any firm plans for the future, Gonzales said, “Right now everything is up in the air.”
Also up in the air is the future of the building that housed The Station. The building at 8420 Brookfield Ave. was the Hollywood section’s first commercial structure, built in the 1890s. According to the book Brookfield, Illinois: A History, the ground floor of the building housed a general store, while the second floor served as a meeting hall. A drawing of the building appears in an artist’s rendering of the area in the 1893 Hollywood catalog published by S.E. Gross, Brookfield’s founder.
The building has been for sale since at least May 2009. The asking price for the building, which includes the ground floor commercial spaces and two apartments above, is $399,000. That’s down from the original asking price of $479,800.
The building was purchased for $425,000 in December 2003 and deeded to a corporation called Prairie Grass 8420 LLC, which is tied to LaGrange-based Prairie Grass Properties, which lists Peter Asick Jr. and Julie Asick as managers of the company.