NEW PALESTINE — A liquor store is moving into a larger, renovated space and will toast the town through a mural on one of its walls.
Elite Beverages, currently located at 5048 W. Main St., New Palestine, is moving down the street into the former NAPA Auto Parts building at 54 W. Main St.
Raymond Cox, owner of the regional spirit shop chain, also bought the property to the west of the new location that formerly held a fire station that was torn down. The parcel will be used for more parking for the business.
“When we bought that store about five years ago, I’d always intended to move it,” Cox said of the current New Palestine location. “And really it took me this long to really find the right spot and make the right deal to move the store.”
Of the seven Elite Beverages stores in the area, New Palestine’s is the smallest, at about 600 to 700 square feet.
“You really can’t do much out of it,” Cox said. “We stuffed as much product as we could into it and we’ve increased sales from the time we bought it, but you can only do so much with 600 square feet.”
Other Elite Beverages locations are in McCordsville, Cumberland, Lawrence, Noblesville and Fortville, where a new store was built in place of its former building. It opened in 2019.
The new store in New Palestine will be about 4,000 square feet and have about 25 parking spaces.
“We will have the room to have a full selection of beer, wine and spirits, and we’ll have parking for plenty of customers,” Cox said. “We’re really pretty pleased.”
The store is getting an all new front facade. Inside, it’ll have new shelving, lighting, flooring, counters and a tasting counter for consumer tastings after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides.
Along with all of the beer and craft brews as well as domestic and imported wines, Elite Beverages in New Palestine will also offer bourbon barrel picks hand-selected by the business’s tasting panel during visits to distilleries in Kentucky.
“We’ll have as many of those as we can get this coming year,” Cox said.
He’s hoping for a grand opening in April or May and said the location will start out with five employees.
Cox is working with New Palestine Main Street, a nonprofit organization that represents the town’s downtown, on getting a mural on the store’s west exterior wall facing eastbound traffic on Main Street/U.S. 52.
“As you enter New Palestine, you’ll be able to see it,” said Julie Lucas, president of New Palestine Main Street.
Lucas said the mural will pay homage to the generations of farming families in the New Palestine community, along with landmarks like the local grain elevator and railroad that runs through the area.
“It’s going to remind people where we came from and the agricultural pioneers of our town,” she said.
The mural’s timing fits nicely with the town’s 150th anniversary this year, Lucas added.
“It all ties together with the year of celebration we’re wanting to have, and New Palestine Main Street is the leader of getting that going,” she said.
Nick Smith, a New Palestine High School graduate and Irvington-based artist, will paint the mural.
Lucas hopes for the mural to be finished by the time New Palestine’s annual Summer Fest kicks off the last weekend in June.
