“This is a great, great place,” Litteral said.
The building once housed a bar under a variety of names, including Fat Boys and Boris’ Nite Club. In 2003, Boris’ had 80 police runs, nearly double the number of calls to almost any other bars in more than 10 years.
In early 2004, William G. Evans Sr. was fatally shot outside the bar following an altercation there. Jamarr R. Stone of Dayton is serving a sentence of 15 years to life on a murder charge.
The city successfully challenged the renewal of the permit in 2005, and it was transferred to another business. A News-Sun investigation showed the city lost 81 percent of the time it challenged liquor permits last decade.
Now the former bar is a ministry and outreach center, serving free food and coffee, and holding services on Sundays.
Director Larry Davis, who says he once ran the streets in the neighborhood, before meeting his wife almost 20 years ago, wasn’t surprised to learn that Boris’ once topped the police calls list. It was a place to go find a fight, he said.
Now though, neighbors smile at him when they see his truck pull into the lot.
“It may have been a bar and people may still consider it a bar, but Jesus is the bartender,” he said.
The community center is a project of the Children’s Rescue Center and another nonprofit, North Hill II for Children.
The Children’s Rescue Center converted its first bar in 1995, taking the old Selma Road Bar and Grill and reusing it for its after-school and Bible study programs, now the Ark South.
In 2002 to 2003, it teamed up with North Hill and the Rev. Bill McKee, former pastor at Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, to buy the old Peacock on Chestnut Avenue, another tough bar well-known to the police. They opened another after-school program there, the Ark North.
Then in 2006, they teamed up again to buy the Main Street bar, which they first opened as Un Mundo Cafe and then as the ministry center.
They didn’t set out with a plan to take out bars in Springfield, said Susie Rastatter, rescue center co-administrator. But while it wasn’t their intention, Rastatter said it reminds her of the Scripture passages on turning swords into plowshares and second chances.
“We really feel like God is leading the way, and he took us to locations he wants us to do ministry out of and it happens to be bars,” she said.
The centers are great transformations, police Chief Stephen Moody said.
“One day at 241 Chestnut, you’ve got calls of gunshots and now you hear kids’ laughter,” he said.
Home for ministry
City Commissioner Kevin O’Neill also owns McMurray’s, across North Limestone Street from the former Peacock. He remembers it as a rough place once the clientele changed, and it was no longer a neighborhood bar. It became a place for violence, drugs and prostitution — “bad stuff” to O’Neill.
“There was a lot of fear with what was going on,” he said. Good Shepherd had several children attending Sunday school from the neighborhood in and around Chestnut Avenue at the time, McKee said.
When driving some of them home, he saw that the Peacock was for sale and knew it had been a problem spot. One mother had told him she was worried about letting her children play in her yard because of the violence there.
McKee then called Rastatter to see if the group would be interested in expanding the Ark to the north end.
“It gave the children a place to go after school where they could play, a place that was safe,” Mc-Kee said.
She remembers him joking about a pastor buying a bar.
“But what he said to us was just that he wanted to provide a home for us to do ministry,” Rastatter said.
A couple of years later, Nancy Lutz, also CRC co-administrator, was driving down West Main Street when she saw a for sale sign on the old Boris’ Nite Club. She sensed a calling to do ministry there, found out it was in foreclosure and would be available at a sheriff’s auction.
That meant they couldn’t see it before buying it.
“It was a disaster,” Lutz said. “We walked in and there was still beer on the counters. ... But we stood here in the midst of all of that and prayed.”
Forgotten people
The first idea was a teen center, but that didn’t really gel. Then they got the idea for a coffee shop open to everyone. It served as Un Mundo Cafe until it relocated to the Heritage Center downtown last year.
But the rescue center didn’t want to leave the neighborhood. Then it transformed again into Un Mundo on Main as a ministry and outreach center.
A lot of people might not feel comfortable going into a traditional church setting, Davis said.
“But they will walk through that door there,” said Davis, who volunteers his time to run the center.
He serves a lot of homeless and needy people from the neighborhood — people he said feel forgotten — with free meals, coffee, a food pantry and church services on Sundays. He thinks of the center like his home and dinner table.
Davis told his family doctor about the center, and he now comes down and provides free check-ups about twice a month. Several churches also volunteer there.
Rastatter likes that the center is inviting and still looks like a coffee shop or restaurant, not a soup kitchen.
Blue Thompson agrees. Thompson just got into a recovery home after being on the streets and came to Un Mundo on Main recently for dinner.
“People like to feel like they aren’t just standing in a soup bowl line and asking for a hand out,” he said.
Instead, at Un Mundo on Main, Thompson pointed out that the volunteers sit down and talk with diners while soothing music plays.
When the homeless have somewhere to get a meal and people to talk to, Thompson said they are less likely to get into trouble on the streets.
“It’s a nice, quiet environment. ... They are friendly and caring people here,” he said.
Community model
To McKee, it’s amazing to think back on what the centers were like and how they are used now.
He is now an assistant to the bishop for the Southern Ohio Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. He sees the action he helped take on the Peacock and Boris’ as a development model other communities could replicate, and he’s spreading the word about it to other churches.
It’s a way a congregation or neighborhood can take control of problems themselves, he said, and defend against it from reoccurring while helping people.
“You take eyesores out and put in a bright spot and it makes a really big difference,” he said.
Mayor Warren Copeland agreed, saying the rescue center and North Hill have provided a positive service.
“They’ve done the community a favor, not just by taking out a nuisance, but by replacing it with something that serves the community much better,” he said.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0363 or ssommer@coxohio.com.
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