An arcade and a record store in downtown Aurora are set to join together at a new, much-larger location not too far away.
Yetee Station, which is currently at 11 N. Broadway, and Superjumbo Records, which is currently at 102 E. Galena Blvd., are both owned by Mike Mancuso. He’s also the co-owner of TheYetee.com, an e-commerce business also located in Aurora that is known for its daily-changing selection of T-shirt designs.
The idea was always to make Yetee Station and Superjumbo into a single, cohesive thing, Mancuso said. Plus, both are running out of space at their current locations.
“So being able to get a lot more space and finally kind of have them under the same roof, it’s a dream,” he told The Beacon-News.
The two businesses will be combined into one — Superjumbo Records and Arcade — and moved to 55 S. Lake St, which is the building just outside downtown that used to hold the antique store Warehouse 55 before it moved to Batavia last year.
The businesses’ current locations are set to close on May 3, according to Mancuso. He said that, once the new location opens, it will be “just a giant, cool place to hang out.”
The record store portion of the business should be open within that same week, he said, but the arcade part will take some extra time because of additional approvals needed from the city.
A committee of the Aurora City Council last week unanimously voted to recommend for approval an ordinance that would allow the arcade to be located at 55 S. Lake St. Another committee is set to hear the proposal on Tuesday, and then it heads to a final vote at the Aurora City Council as early as next week.
Although he was reluctant to give a specific timeframe for opening the arcade, Mancuso said he was hoping to have it open in early summer.
Once in the new location, the arcade is expected to have double the amount of games currently available at Yetee Station.
The majority of those games will be “free play” — that is, people pay a daily fee and can play as many games as they want — but more modern games may be coin-operated, Mancuso said.
The record store portion of the business will also be growing. According to Mancuso, Superjumbo used to also have an art gallery and sell movies, things that could come back at the new location.
Plus, Superjumbo has been holding back on things like listening parties and has turned down artists that wanted to do in-store performances because of the limited space, Mancuso said. But in the new space, he said, there will be enough room to do things like that.
Although moving a business is always scary, Mancuso said he is confident in the decision. When asked if Superjumbo and Yetee Station are doing well, he said they were, with word-of-mouth and foot traffic increasing in recent years.
“I used to be scared that no one would show up to the listening parties,” he said. “Our last listening parties, we had so many people we had to break it up into groups. So yeah, the last year has been really great.”
Although the businesses are doing well, they come from a personal place for Mancuso.
He said that his three favorite places were always video stores, arcades and record stores. They’ve all kind of disappeared, and so he wanted to bring them back and do something cool for downtown.
“I always wanted to work at a record store, and so I kind of made one,” Mancuso said. “I’ve been collecting arcade games forever, so it kind made sense to finally open an arcade.”
Now, nearly all the arcade games he’s collected over more than 10 years will be held at this new location.
rsmith@chicagotribune.com
