“A home, a hotbed, a haven,” is a phrase Hannah Nyhart has used to summarize her business, Build Coffee, since she graduated from the University of Chicago. Intimate and comforting, Build Coffee operates in an environment of brick, dark wood and the occasional throw pillow. Professional and homemade zines — small magazines concerning social justice issues — line the bookshelves. Local art takes up all other available wall space. 

When she was 22, Hannah Nyhart took a huge risk. She opened her own business with her best friend, Bea Malsky. Under the leadership of two women barely out of college, this coffee shop became a centerpiece of the South Side community. Ms. Nyhart has stood behind the counter at Build every day since it was founded in 2017. Now, she has decided to sell the coffee shop and used bookstore on East 61st St and South Blackstone Avenue. 

During college, Ms. Nyhart was the assistant editor of the South Side Weekly — a student newspaper at the time. She also worked at the UChicago Divinity School’s coffee shop, Grounds of Being.

“For me, during school, both the coffee shop and the reporting were the things that felt so much more real and important to me than the classes,” she said. 

This sense of importance stemmed from these institutions’ connections to the South Side. Through her engagement with the local community, Ms. Nyhart learned that she was motivated by the idea of making a space for gathering. 

“What I really wanted was to build a soft place to land for people, and build another home for people,” she said. “And I think that’s really important infrastructure.”

So Ms. Nyhart partnered with her friend Ms. Malsky to acquire the space and then to open Build. 

“From the start Hannah put a lot of work into making it a very open space,” Ms. Malsky said.

After the pandemic, Ms. Malsky stepped back from the day-to-day operations of the shop. This left Ms. Nyhart in charge of the logistics, managing the business’s zine collection and partnerships with local artists. Last year, Ms. Nyhart began to notice that the shop was not operating at its full potential.

“At some point last year I realized that there were a lot of things that I thought that the shop needed to grow and be sustainable and thrive that I wasn’t doing, and I realized that I was pretty burnt out,” she said.

It was difficult to come to the conclusion that selling the shop was the next step. Ms. Nyhart’s life since college has been dedicated to Build Coffee. She knows the names of the two men who come in at 7:30 a.m. every morning. She knows their orders. But what matters most to her is to stay true to the original idea of stewardship she and Ms. Malsky held from the beginning.

“Letting a project change hands can be really helpful, and can bring new possibilities and new growth that’s not possible if one person holds it the whole time,” Ms. Nyhart said.

While they don’t have a buyer or a concrete timeline, Ms Nyhart and Ms. Malsky have made peace with handing over the reins. Ms. Nyhart sees it as a final act in service of the communal space they helped to build. She said that part of creating a business in service of a community is knowing when to move on. 

“I think that it’s care work, right?” she said. “I think you’re taking care.”