Addison Bliss, architect and part owner of PH Coffee in Pendleton Heights neighborhood, first began working with the Northeast community about six years ago when he began leading the project for the embankment slide at Concourse Park.

“The thought process behind the design was that slides are awesome and everybody wants to ride down a slide, but we didn’t want to do a small slide or a number of them. We wanted to do one slide for everyone, to bring in all people and all cultures,” he said. “I loved that project a lot. It was kind of like my baby. That’s when I really started loving the neighborhood. I love the community support and the idea that you’re bringing in all these cultures together.”

His new project, a new coffee shop in the Pendleton Heights neighborhood, is set to open soon. The kickstarter campaign has been fully funded, allowing the crew to put up some finishing touches.

“With all the community support we are completely funded, which will allow us to finish up the details like the kid zone and making it look really cool, finishing the furniture, the sign, and help us on all the details we had been coming up short on,” he said.

Now, he says he hopes PH Coffee brings just as much joy to the community as a giant slide.

“I hope it gets us the exact same mentality where you put a slide on the side of a hill and you let people do with it as they please,” he said. “You can see kids going down backwards and bringing out their own superslide and playing with it in their own way. The same mentality is what we have for the coffee shop, where we open a coffee shop and give them the seating types, lounge types, a kid zone, and all the things we think they are going to want, and then they are going to help us and tell us how they want to use it, whether it’s a community center or meeting place, we will let the community forge that for us.”

Keep an eye out for the grand opening date of PH Coffee, coming soon!