Did King Street lose a business this year, or did it trade one for three?
If you walked past 20 West King Street sometime after May, you noticed the empty storefront where Jane's Art of Pie Cafe used to be. The pie case is gone. The hand-painted art that lined the hallway, Jane Offner's own work, is reportedly staying up for whoever moves in next. After nearly six years in the historic Sturgis House and a Chamber of Commerce Small Business of the Year award in 2025, the cafe closed for good this spring. That's the kind of loss that makes a downtown feel like it's shrinking.
Except it isn't. Walk two blocks in either direction and you'll find that King Street has been busier with new tenants this year than the Art of Pie closure alone would suggest. The story isn't vacancy. It's replacement, and it's happening faster and in more directions than most people walking down King Street have noticed.
What actually closed, and why it matters
Jane Offner opened Art of Pie in 2020 as part of her retirement plan, not because she'd always dreamed of running a cafe. She told The Slate the timing just worked out, that Shippensburg had a need she happened to fill. The cafe became one of those places locals mention by name when they're describing the town to someone new, the kind of small business that quietly does the work of holding a downtown together. Offner has said she hopes to teach classes in the future to help revitalize downtown, which suggests she isn't done with King Street even if the pie case is gone for now.
That closure is real and worth naming honestly. But it's also the only closure in this particular stretch of downtown this year. Everything else on this list is new.
The replacements nobody announced with a ribbon-cutting banner
Two blocks from the empty Sturgis House space, at 85 West King Street on the corner of King and Fayette, Nonna Ilva opened after a soft launch in February 2025 and a formal Chamber ribbon-cutting that followed. The building had housed some version of a pizza shop for more than a decade, so on paper this looks like a lateral move: one pizza place became another. In practice, Nonna Ilva brought a full Italian menu, table service, and an interior redone to feel like a trattoria, plus name recognition from sister locations already running in Carlisle and Hershey. That's a different kind of business than what was there before, even if the ovens are in the same spot.
Further east, at 211 East King Street, the storefront that used to hold Raspberry Jam now belongs to Sip Seoul Mart, a boba tea and ramen shop that opened just weeks ago. This is the newest entry on the list by a wide margin, recent enough that most residents outside the immediate block may not have clocked it yet. It's also a genre of business King Street hasn't had before. Downtown has diners, pizza, and now an Italian sit-down restaurant. It hasn't had boba.
Here's the reshuffle laid out plainly:
| Address | What Was There | What's There Now | What Changed |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20 W King St | Jane's Art of Pie Cafe | Vacant, next tenant not yet announced | A six-year fixture closed; Offner's artwork stays for the next tenant |
| 85 W King St | A pizza shop (decade-plus run) | Nonna Ilva | Counter pizza became sit-down Italian dining |
| 211 E King St | Raspberry Jam | Sip Seoul Mart | First boba and ramen shop on King Street |
| The Red Rocker, lower level | N/A | TPDC Pinball and Sports Cards | A hobby arcade tucked below street level |
The one most people are walking past without knowing it exists
That last row deserves its own explanation, because it's the one piece of this turnover that isn't visible from the sidewalk at all.
Below street level in The Red Rocker, TPDC Pinball and Sports Cards shares a floor with Spanky's Loot Stash, Collector's Corner, and Level Up Games, a cluster of small hobby businesses that add up to a genuine scene if you know to look for the stairs down. TPDC hosted a tournament this year that drew players describing pinball less as nostalgia and more as an active, growing hobby. One regular, identified in coverage only as J Matthew, put it simply: people can grab a drink from King's Cafe upstairs and come down to hang out and play. That's a small ecosystem, a cafe feeding foot traffic to an arcade feeding foot traffic to three more hobby shops, all inside one building most people drive past without a second look.
This is the part of the turnover story that a windshield survey of King Street won't catch. You can note that Art of Pie closed and Nonna Ilva opened just from walking the block. You won't know about TPDC unless someone tells you it's there, or unless you're the kind of person who takes the stairs down out of curiosity.
Why this counts as one story, not four
Here's the claim worth sitting with: downtown Shippensburg didn't get quieter this year. It got harder to read at a glance.
A storefront closing is visible. It's a dark window and a "for lease" sign, and it registers immediately as loss. A storefront reopening under a new name registers too, but usually as a single, isolated event, easy to file away as "oh, that's different now" without connecting it to anything else. What's harder to see, unless you're tracking addresses the way this list does, is that King Street absorbed one closure and three additions in roughly the same twelve-month window, and that the additions span three completely different categories: full-service Italian dining, boba and ramen, and competitive pinball. That's not a downtown running on the same handful of restaurant concepts rotating through empty storefronts. That's a downtown adding variety it didn't have twelve months ago, even while it lost something that mattered.
The mechanism worth understanding is simple. Small commercial buildings in a town like Shippensburg turn over fast because the spaces are small and the rents are workable for a first-time or second-time owner. That's exactly how Nonna Ilva's owners could bring a concept that already worked in Carlisle and Hershey to a corner spot that used to be a pizza counter, and how Sip Seoul Mart could take over a compact storefront that Raspberry Jam had outgrown or moved on from. It's also, unfortunately, how a beloved single-owner shop like Art of Pie can close without a chain stepping in to fill the space immediately. The same flexibility that makes King Street easy to open a business on makes it easy to lose one too.
If you're a longtime resident who mentally files King Street as "the diner, the pizza place, and whatever's next to the bank," this is the update. The bones of downtown are the same. What's inside those bones has genuinely diversified in the last year, from cafe-and-diner territory into sit-down Italian, Korean-inspired boba, and a hobby-arcade scene that's growing a following of its own.
Worth a walk, whether or not you were looking for one
None of this requires a reason beyond curiosity. If you haven't been down King Street in a few months, it's worth the walk just to see what's changed and what hasn't. Grab a table at Nonna Ilva, try the boba at Sip Seoul Mart, or take the stairs down at The Red Rocker and see what a Friday night pinball tournament actually looks like. Keep an eye on 20 West King Street too. Whatever moves into the old Art of Pie space next will say something about where downtown goes from here.
Lisa Mack has spent years watching Shippensburg's downtown add up storefront by storefront, and she keeps that kind of local detail on hand for anyone thinking about what it actually means to live here day to day. If you're weighing a move to Shippensburg, curious what your current home might be worth in a town that keeps reinventing its own Main Street, or just want a local's read on what's changing block by block, reach out anytime for a Free Home Valuation and a conversation grounded in what's actually happening here, not a generic market report.
