Landlord to convert excess warehouse into hardware store

The owner of a generations-old City Park West business is looking to bring a hardware store to the neighborhood.

Jerry’s Nut House owner Stephen Julia, the grandson of the man who opened the nut and snack packer and distributor in 1948, wants to keep the legacy business at 2101 N. Humboldt St. but says that Jerry’s is occupying more space than it needs.

Scaling Jerry’s back to about half of the building’s 28,400 square feet of space, as Julia hopes to do, would create plenty of space for another venture. The Julia family has settled on working to add an Ace Hardware in that location.

“I’ve been looking to scale Jerry’s back for a long time,” Julia said Tuesday. “It’s too much space for us. There’s a big retail store built out, a large office we never made full use of, and then we never got the retail traction from the store for what we do. I don’t think it was the right fit. And that’s a significant portion of the space — the other part was production, and we’ve changed some things around there, scaling that back, too.”

Before he can bring Ace to the space, Julia needs approval from the City Council to rezone the property. His rezoning application was before a council committee Tuesday morning and was forwarded unanimously to the full council.

Julia said the national chain’s neighborhood feel and the independence offered to store owners were big parts of what drew his family — his parents still co-own Jerry’s with him — to Ace specifically.

“No franchise fee, no secret shopping. It’s just a support structure,” he said. “I can even put my Jerry’s Nut House products in the queue line. They encourage that, even. I currently own and operate a local business, obviously, and I want to have another. That’s just the feel I want.”

Julia said he estimates the Ace taking up a bit less than 10,000 square feet and the smaller version of Jerry’s to take up about 11,000.

“Jerry’s has been in the family since 1948,” Julia said. “I’ve been operating it for more than 10 years for my folks, and I know they don’t want to see Jerry’s go away. Neither do I. This seemed like a logical step to make sure we can make money and secure it for the future.”

Jerry’s Nut House, Julia said, is a mainly wholesale nuts and snacks packer that also has a retail arm.

Timing on the changes is pretty hard to nail down, Julia said, given uncertainty around the rezoning and more. He said he hoped to have Ace in and Jerry’s scaled back by the end of this year, but that early next year was a possibility.