Mitsuko Vary lives downtown and works downtown, and starting today she'll be able to shop for groceries downtown, too.

She's been walking to the Family Thrift Center on Omaha Street, but now she'll just have to take the elevator down from her loft in the Windsor Block to the new Windsor Block Grocery.

"It will definitely be cool," she said -- one more thing that's great about living in the heart of the city, like when she can open her windows and hear music from the Summer Nights festival, or walk to a restaurant.

Matt Batchelder, owner of Batchelder's Plummer Piano & Organ business next door to the grocery, is venturing into the grocery business with a shop that sells all your basic produce and canned and dry goods along with beer, candy, magazines and more.

The store also has a café with wireless Internet, a salad-and-sandwich bar and the type of packaged food found at a typical gas station convenience store.

The project is a bookend on many months of work at the southeast corner of Seventh and St. Joseph streets.

Windsor Block owner Dan Senftner restored the facades of the storefronts and the block is now listed as a contributing structure in the downtown historic district. He turned 13,000 square feet of empty storage space on the second floor into high-end lofts.

And now the grocery fills a niche for the thousands of people who live and work downtown, Senftner said.

In a 1950s building formerly occupied by the Body Builder Christian Bookstore, the grocery business was an idea that came down to timing, Senftner and Batchelder said.

Senftner owned the building since 1985, but that was the era when "everyone was going to the mall," he said.

Now, "They want upper scale, they want quaint, they want atmosphere. It has to fit as to what the public and the people in the area want," he said. "I think timing in life is everything. Things just have to fall into place and you have to make it happen when it's ready."

So with people now living upstairs, when the bookstore owners told Senftner they would be closing, Batchelder knew it was the right time for the grocery.

"Dan and I had talked about downtown needing a convenience store, needing a grocery store, for years and years," he said. "Downtown is coming alive. There's a lot more people that live downtown than I think the general public knows about."

The grocery and the café are a new addition but reminiscent of an era when downtowns flourished, said John Brewer of the Downtown Association, which is working to make the area flourish again.

"It's the corner grocery downtown that really makes a neighborhood," Brewer said.

They're not up yet, but the grocery will feature historic photos of the area compiled by Jean Kessloff of the Rapid City Historic Preservation Commission, who worked with Senftner on the remodeling.

She said her research found that the eastern-most storefront in the Windsor Block used to house a shop called Henry's Grocery.

"It's come full circle and I think it's great," Kessloff said. "It's amazing how the Windsor Block is the Windsor Block again. It's a great asset to Rapid City."