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Eli Cox owns the barstools at My Boy Tony, and now the ground they sit on, too.
“I just want to keep it as something good for the community,” he said.
Cox and business partner Mark Hansen, who owns the backpack brand Topo Designs, purchased the real estate for their bar at 4280 Tennyson St. last week for $1.6 million, according to public records.
No immediate changes are planned. The 1,620-square-foot corner retail building has an outdoor patio and a single apartment upstairs. It traded for $957 per square foot, which Cox said “wasn’t dramatically less” than the appraised value.
Public records show that the two buyers took out a $1.2 million, 25-year loan with a variable interest rate from Alpine Bank. No outside investors are involved in the real estate, Cox said. The bar business has a third partner, John Strieby, who was not part of the property transaction.
The building was sold by Nicole Sullivan, who operated BookBar — a part bookstore, part bar — in the space for about a decade before closing in early 2023. Sullivan bought the building for $685,000 in September 2012, records show.
“When we bought the building, there were bars on all the doors and the windows. The bowling alley was still there, the hardware store was still there, (Tennyson) was very different,” Sullivan said.
The property was originally a Victorian-style home built in 1896. Its retail storefront was later added in 1948, public records show. Sullivan never listed the building for sale, instead going to Cox and Hansen, who had told her they wanted a chance to buy should she ever sell.
“I would have never sold it to a developer,” Sullivan said. “I would be completely heartbroken if it were ever scraped.”
Sullivan, 52, is preparing to move out of state. Last month, she sold her remaining bookstore, The Bookies at 2085 Holly St. in Denver’s Virginia Village neighborhood. Sullivan still owns that store’s real estate, however, as well as a building at 4890 Lowell Blvd. in Berkeley. It houses her nonprofit, BookGive, which gives away used books.
“Books were my window to the greater world. Had it not been for that, I probably would have just stayed in my hometown and would’ve ended up with a smaller life,” said Sullivan, who hails from a small town in Missouri. “All the reading I did opened me up to all the other cultures that were out there.”
For Cox, meanwhile, this building is another feather in his Tennyson real estate cap. The entrepreneur founded clothing store Berkeley Supply in 2012, situated two blocks up the street from My Boy Tony. He and partners purchased the liquor store at 4340 Tennyson St. and its real estate in the fall of 2022. Before these ventures, he worked at another Tennyson eatery, Hops & Pie.
“Without Tennyson Street, I would have nothing, and I want to make sure it stays the way it’s always been and not get crazy corporate,” Cox said.
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Matthew Geiger
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