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Niche Book Bar launched in 2018 when Cetonia Weston-Roy bought a used bicycle. She drew up plans for a makeshift bookshelf that would attach behind the back wheel and brought them to Raul’s Wood Shop. After construction, she painted the mobile book bar a bright yellow, stocked the shelves and started selling. For her first outing, she pedaled just a few blocks from her house to the West Vliet Street Market.
Over the next four years, she sold Black literature around Milwaukee on her bike and at venues like the Sherman Phoenix, while also working part-time as a behavioral health technician at Great Lakes Behavior Analysis. All the while, she was searching for locations and applying for grants to turn the mobile business into a permanent shop.
“I’ve always been very set on a brick and mortar,” Weston-Roy says. “All of the other things I’ve done in between were ideas that came along the way.” The vision came a step closer to reality in 2021, when she applied for a space in a building at 1937 N. Martin Luther King Dr. The Bronzeville Advisory Committee accepted her proposal, and she’s been working to build the store there since. She plans to open this year.
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Niche will be the only Black-owned bookstore in Milwaukee since The Reader’s Choice closed in 2017. “Wide variety of representation matters in everything we consume, from our screens to what we read,” Weston-Roy says. “I’d become cognizant of what was missing from my shelves and was deliberately seeking Black literature. I knew that was my bookstore’s ‘niche.’”
When it opens, Niche will be more than just a place to shop for books. Weston-Roy hopes to create a social gathering place by offering coffee, tea, wine and baked goods for readers to pair with their literature. And the store will host author events and book clubs.
Weston-Roy is also an author herself, with two published children’s books in the Misadventures of Toni Macaroni series, and she plans to continue writing. But for now, her primary focus is on the months ahead, when her work pays off and Niche finally opens its doors.
