Bosse's Newsstand, a downtown Green Bay fixture for 124 years, has found a new home outside the city
GREEN BAY - Bosse's Newsstand & Tobacco Shop will mark its 125th year in business at its new home on De Pere's east side.
A downtown Green Bay mainstay for 124 years, Bosse's managers Lisa and Steve Mitchell on Thursday emailed followers word the shop would relocate to 107 S. Broadway, in downtown De Pere, later this year.
The Mitchells spent September searching for a new location in the Green Bay area after the owner of their longtime space at 220 Cherry St. changed their redevelopment plans for the 0.36-acre site at the corner of Cherry and Adams streets.
The building's owner, TAJ Enterprises LLC, originally planned to add five stories of apartments to the existing structure in the 200 block of Cherry Street, but engineers this summer said it would be more cost-effective to demolish the structure and replace it.
Bosse's will remain open on Cherry Street until late November, and will open in its new location Dec. 1. In an email Thursday, Lisa Mitchell said Bosse's never wanted to leave downtown Green Bay, but was not able to find a new location that suited its needs.
The downtown De Pere location offered the right amount of space, free parking for car traffic, a good volume of pedestrian traffic and additional retailers nearby.
"Downtown De Pere has 'a really good feel to it,'" Lisa Mitchell said. "There are a lot of very nice shops, coffee shops and restaurants in a small area. It is a very pretty, walkable, clean and welcoming small city."
Lisa Mitchell said Bosse's intends to keep its product mix similar in the new location, but will adjust to new customers and add new products as it settles in.
Bosse's space in De Pere is part of the six-building South Broadway Historic District, construction of which dates back to the 1880s, according to the Wisconsin Register of Historic Places. The space at 107 S. Broadway will be renovated this fall. Bosse's expects to begin moving equipment and inventory in in November ahead of the Dec. 1 re-opening.
The new downtown Green Bay building set to replace the existing Bosse's building will include 10,000 square feet of first floor commercial space, 57 apartments on five floors and a skywalk connection to the Cherry Street parking ramp adjacent to the site. But demolition meant Bosse's would have to find a new home.
Art and Joe Bosse founded the eponymous newsstand and tobacco shop in 1898 on the corner of Cherry and Adams Streets.
Joe Bosse hired a 12-year-old Norman Liebert as a paperboy in 1922. Liebert took over the business in 1943 when Bosse died.
Steve Liebert, Norman's son, started to help out at the store in the 1950s and he and his wife, Sandra, took over when Norman retired in the 1990s. He still owns the business today. Liebert's daughter, Lisa, and her husband Steven Mitchell, represent the third generation of the family and continue to run the business today. Lisa Mitchell said their daughter, Kayla — the fourth generation — now works at Bosse's, too.
Bosse's remained a fixture on the corner of Cherry and Adams until 1981 when downtown redevelopment forced Bosse's to relocate a half-block west, to 220 Cherry St. The original site became a parking lot for the Boston Store in Port Plaza Mall, according to Press-Gazette archives.
Contact Jeff Bollier at (920) 431-8387 or jbollier@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @JeffBollier.
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This article originally appeared on Green Bay Press-Gazette: Longtime Green Bay business Bosse's Newsstand finds a new location
