After the turmoil earlier this year, students returning for the Fall Semester can expect some of the known businesses to stay in the Village with only one addition.
The Village, two blocks on University avenue and a few steps away from the L.A. Pittenger Student Center, has gone through some changes in the past few months. In December, Myles Ogea lost a foreclosure judgment of more than $500,000 to the bank that held the mortgage to the MT Cup property. The property was set to be sold in an auction May 12, but hours before the auction, Ogea filed for bankruptcy.
Two months after the canceled auction, the MT Cup still stands. Ball State student Chloe Woggon, an employee that has worked at the MT Cup for about a year, said although she is not sure about what plans are for the coffee shop, she expects it to still be open by the time Ball State students come back for the fall.
"Myles told us we are going to be ordering more supplies and right now they are working upstairs," she said. "We are expecting to stay open next semester."
A new addition to the Village is Be Here Now, a new bar that opened two weeks ago where Doc's on Dill and more recently Charlie's Library were located. Although the bar just opened and is in a growing process, manager Kyle Quinlan said they want to see the bar offer a more healthy environment for students. Be Here Now owner Whitney Stump used to work at the Chug, another bar in the Village.
"Whitney wanted to bring a positive environment to the bar, and for it to be successful enough to make a change in the community," Quinlan said. "He wanted a place where kids would want to come more than once, a place for bars, visual artists and comedians."
Jarod Kienitz, a bartender at Be Here Now, said he expected the bar to be more stable now that there was less of a threat of having high rent.
"Myles does not own the place," he said. "He used to be the man in between the actual owner and those who rented."
Lucas Lantz, a senior marketing major, said he wanted to see something different from what he's seen in the past few years in the Village.
"Be Here Now, I think, is a little extension of what's going on downtown," he said. "I just want to see change. I want to see something different from the usual college bars."
Woggon said she would like to see more venues that were not necessarily bars. She said the Village has been shrinking since she's been in Muncie, and would like to see that change.
"A lot of people make remarks every year about how it has been changing," she said. "It was kind of sad to see lot of places now empty."
But others are still skeptical about new businesses in the Village. Senior international business major Dennis Reber said he's seen too many bars come and go before Be Here Now for him to believe a new bar can stay for long.
"It would be nice to see more establishments," he said. "But I think we have too many bars. We need something different. It would bring a different feel."
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