Cicada Books and Coffee, located at 604 14th Street, West Huntington, offers a fresh take on Old Central City. After two years of planning and dreaming, Katie Norman and her mother opened Cicada Books and Coffee with the hope of becoming a “third space.”

“We really want to be a community fixture. We want to be a place where people are comfortable coming in and hanging out, meet with friends and play with board games,” Norman said. “We want to be like a third space, a place other than home or work, where people are out spending time in their community.”

Norman, a senior at Marshall University double majoring in English and biology, decided to open the business after years of consideration.

“My parents actually have wanted to start a bookstore in Huntington for a really long time and it never really panned out. A couple years ago my mom moved into an apartment about two blocks away and she saw this building for sale and I said like, ‘you know we really could do something with this building,’ and we decided to try it out,” Norman said. “We have been working on this for last couple of years, just slowly while doing other things. I am a student at Marshall, and she has a different business, so we have been just sort of working at it in our spare time. We have always been book lovers and while finding a viable business plan we added coffee to the mix, making a natural combination.”

Old Central City is home to The Wild Ramp and many antique stores, but with the new addition of Cicada Books and Coffee, Norman sees potential to get more visitors in the west end.

“We really like this part of the city. I think it’s really cute, and it has a lot of potential to be a really cool community area, with The Wild Ramp down here, especially,” Norman said. “There are a lot of shops that are owned by retired people who really only open when they feel like it, so we wanted to have something down here that is always there and sort of a staple of the street. We have long hours, we want to be somewhere where people can just stop in while they are doing thing down here. We want to help boost the area. We hope we can draw in people who maybe otherwise wouldn’t be at this other end of town, or wouldn’t be exploring the rest of Huntington.”

Dawn Nolan is a barista at Cicada Books and Coffee and a Marshall graduate. While attending Marshall, Nolan studied English literature and sees this new store has a combination of two of her interests.

“To combine my interest in literature and coffee, this seemed like the perfect combination,” Nolan said. “This space is just different. You can feel the laid back atmosphere and the colors sort of draw people in, it feels like something different down here.”

Cicada Books and Coffee offers many genres of books including fiction, nonfiction, classics, recent popular literature and mystery novels. The coffeehouse offers specialty coffees, lattes, cold brew and tea, as well as locally made pastries, cookies and donuts. Cicada Books and Coffee is open Monday through Saturday 9 a.m. – 9 p.m. and Sunday 12 p.m.- 6 p.m.

Sadie Helmick can be contacted at [email protected].