Cursed Bikes & Coffee is closing in University City

Beloved University City coffeehouse and bike shop Cursed Bikes & Coffee at 7401 Pershing Ave. at University City is soon to be no more. The business announced on Facebook and Square that Sunday, Feb. 4, would be its last day in business.

“For the past six and a half years it has been our pleasure to provide some of the best coffee in St. Louis as well as bike sales, rentals, and repairs,” it wrote, adding, “It has been our great honor to serve this lovely community at our little corner shop.” Jeff Gerhardt, who owns the shop with his wife Erin, told the RFT that the closure comes because he’s been stretched too thin between running the University City business and A&M Cyclery, in Tower Grove South, which he purchased in 2021.

“I got both A&M and Cursed, and I got a family, and I’m trying to, just honestly, do too much. What suffered was Cursed,” he said, adding that A&M “has so much potential and so much history. It just took so much of my focus to try to ensure its success.”

Compounding the natural difficulty of running two businesses, the Gerhardts recently moved to Kirkwood after originally living next door, and the commute only made things more strained.

The decision to close Cursed came to Gerhardt slowly, he says, and was difficult. “This is the first real business I've ever done,” he said. (Gerhardt opened Cursed after years at Big Shark Bicycles.) “It was a really, really hard decision. My wife's been amazing, and she's backed me up on everything I just wanted to do. But this was just one of those decisions that, even though it's tough, it needed to be done.”

Gerhardt will be keeping A&M Cyclery open, and he still plans to open a cafe side of that business down the road, noting that the location by the park seems ideal for a coffee shop. The news could also have implications for Taco Buddha, which is subletting part of the building from Cursed. “They’re making their own decisions whether or not they want to, or can’t, take it over,” he says. “That’s still up in the air.”

This article was originally published by Riverfront Times.