Future home of a Starbucks?: The old Shell gas station at 524 Indian Boundary Road is now just a heap of dirt after being demolished. Luke Oil Company, owner of the property, has plans to build a 4,100-square foot, three-unit retail space on the site, and is seeking to place a Starbucks Coffee in one of the units. So far as Chesterton Building Commissioner Mike Orlich knows, the Starbucks deal has not been finalized.             (Tribune photo by Kevin Nevers)

By KEVIN NEVERS

That big scrape of dirt where the Shell gas station used to be at 524 Indian Boundary Road might soon be the home of a new Starbucks Coffee.

A proposed site plan submitted to the Chesterton Building Department by Luke Oil Company, the owner of the property, shows a single building of 4,100 square feet divided into three units, with the easternmost unit of 1,876 square feet dedicated to a “Proposed Starbucks Coffee.”

The site plan also shows a drive-through serving the Starbucks and a parking lot of 42 spaces, two of them handicapped, immediately north of the building.

According to the site plan, access to the building would be off the private drive serving the Indian Oak Mall, immediately east of the McDonald’s and west of the old Shell, while the road cuts onto Indian Boundary which formerly served the gas station would be eliminated.

Building Commissioner Mike Orlich emphasized, however, that at this point the site plan is still preliminary, that substantive features of the plan could yet change, and that to his knowledge Luke has only proposed the Starbucks, not finalized it.

The design of the building itself, though, has been approved by the Indiana Department of Homeland Security’s Division of Fire and Building Safety, Orlich said.

Luke has owned the property for around 10 years and for most of that time leased it to a private operator. But when that operator terminated his lease in 2006, Luke concluded that it would be neither feasible to operate the gas station as presently configured on the site nor possible under the company’s minimum criteria to rebuild it.

The old Shell was around 2,400 square feet with four dispensers. In a filing with the Building Department in March, Luke noted that under its minimum criteria a rebuilt station would require a lot of 1.5 acres, a total of 4,500 square feet of space with 1,000 square feet of that dedicated to a hot food offering, six fuel islands, and an exterior car wash. Orlich told the Chesterton Tribune that the property is not nearly big enough to accommodate that size of an operation.

Posted 10/18/2007