Granite City Coworking is expanding, adding space and some offices on Sutter Street, the main drag of Folsom’s historic district.
Granite City’s main location spans three floors of a building at 705 Gold Lake Drive, the same building that houses attractions like Karen’s Bakery and Mike’s Bikes of Folsom.
Granite City opened with 11,000 square feet of space in 2019, about nine months before Covid-19 hit, and then there was about a 2 1/2 year pause, said co-founder Kyle Middleton. “We are starting to see demand come back."
After the expansion set to be done this month, Granite City will have 16,500 square feet of space.
Granite City is the fourth-largest coworking space locally on the Business Journal’s Coworking Spaces list.
More than half of the members use open space in Granite City, but there are some private offices.
“Ours is pretty communal,” Middleton said. “The majority of people know each other."
About a year ago, Granite City opened Sociology Coffee Bar in about a 2,000-square-foot space with an outdoor patio. That cafe has recently expanded with more space and an extended patio and entrance facing onto Leidesdorff Street, which has a higher-profile view than the other side of the building which faces Lake Natoma Inn.
And Granite City is expanding a bit farther away to an even more visible location, with offices on Sutter Street, just a short walk away. The entrance will be off Sutter Street through an art gallery, and then there will be four offices and a meeting room in about 2,000 square feet upstairs.
“On Sutter Street, that’s a big space,” Middleton said.
The Leidesdorff and Sutter streets frontage are a pretty big deal, he said, because they are more public-facing.
“That adds a lot for us. A lot of people don’t know where we are at,” Middleton said.
In addition to the coworking spaces and offices, Granite City also has a 4,000-square-foot meeting space on Gold Lake Drive, which is the ground floor of a three-story building that is built into the side of a hill. The top floor of the building is on Leidesdorff Street. Granite City rents the meeting space for meetings, hackathons, developer bootcamps and other business purposes during the week, and it gets used for weddings and other social events on weekends.
