Photography by Whitney Curtis
On the back side of a vacant-looking strip on Gravois, Jim Shelvy gazes toward a gravel lot. He gestures, as if drawing blueprints with his fingers, to show where paving stones will soon be laid and where entrepreneurs from the surrounding neighborhoods might sit. His business development and co-working space, Nexcore, has been open just five weeks. Several rooms are littered with lumber scrap, tools, and boxes. The sprawling 137-year-old building, like the neighborhood surrounding it, is a work in progress.
Adjacent blocks are dotted with historic rehabs and empty buildings. Real estate agents call it a transitional neighborhood. “There’s a spirit here, a feeling of movement and change,” says Larry Cohn, who, with Shelvy and his wife, Lauren Shelvy, co-founded Nexcore. “The opportunity to be part of that transition is really inspiring and attractive to us.”
Co-working spaces have become so common here that by the time you read this, Nexcore may no longer be the newest. And that’s a good thing, according to Nexcore’s founders. They say that if Fox Park and other neighborhoods like it can be revitalized, the shift will come on the heels of small businesses and local entrepreneurship that places like Nexcore are fostering, not by means of moonshot efforts to land the next Amazon headquarters.
“We can all get excited and try to do everything we can to bring an Amazon here,” says Sarah Coffin, associate professor of planning and development at Saint Louis University, “but at what cost?”
Photo courtesy of Nexcore
Cities frequently offer large corporations huge tax incentives that undercut a city’s ability to fund schools, public safety, and other city services, she adds. Meanwhile, small and midsize businesses have a comparatively outsized positive economic impact because they rarely leverage such incentives and often rely on other local business services, such as printers and accountants.
That’s true of Nexcore. From the cabinets (Cabinets, Flooring & More) to the countertops (E&B Granite) to the original art on the walls (by Peat “Eyez” Wollaeger and Gecko the Mad Scientist), they’ve sourced as much as possible locally, Jim Shelvy says.
Co-working spaces and business incubators can have “huge micro-benefits at the neighborhood level,” Coffin says, because they give residents with entrepreneurial ambitions but without access to capital the means to scale up a business enterprise. Many of the entrepreneurs working at Nexcore are first-time business owners.
For some, like Antwon “Twin” Tompkin, his business is everything. Tompkin, 24, has been cleaning cars since he was 7 years old. He grew up in East St. Louis, where addiction and violence were staples of daily life. To get by, Tompkin says, he detailed car interiors for drug dealers, who respected his hustle and the quality of his work.
Now, Tompkin stays around the Fox Park neighborhood. He doesn’t call himself homeless, but he doesn’t have a permanent residence and sleeps in his car on many nights. With Nexcore’s help, Tompkin launched his new business, Twin’s Red Carpet Wash, in September. He cleans about 15 cars a week for $60–$80 apiece.
“I would have never known how to do this on my own; I would have still been in East St. Louis, washing cars, and I wouldn’t have been charging the right amount,” Tompkin says. “I never knew what I was worth till I ran into Jim and Larry.”
