New Hampton Cove social hub adds unique destination to North Alabama

New Hampton Cove social hub adds unique destination to North Alabama

Planes, trains and automobiles. Or rather, plane parts, a train car and a double-decker bus.

These are all part of the unique Hampton Cove gathering place “The Grid,” created by Russ Dunford in 2019.

The latest addition is a bright red, double decker bus, which Dunford has turned into a double decker coffee shop. 

That’s right, a bloody red British double decker bus from across the pond. The 1961 Routemaster bus arrived in Alabama last year, and will soon welcome patrons to experience a taste of British culture while they savor the taste of their cappuccino. The coffee business will be managed by Crystal Hogan, owner and operator of Park & Perk Coffee.

Dunford said all the kids in the area call his latest project “The Harry Potter Bus.”

“Long story short,” said Dunford, “my cousin up in North Carolina said, ‘Russ, you ought to put a double-decker coffee bus (at The Grid).’ I said, ‘That ought to be easy, not a problem.’”

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The Grid in Hamton Cove features Nacho’s Mexican food truck, a double-decker red bus coffee shop, and a multi-ton train car, just to name a few attractions

To hear Dunford tell it, It really was pretty easy.

“I get on the Internet, like people do, and I start looking. I find this guy named Carl up in South Dakota. I call, and I get a hold of the guy. I say, ‘Carl, I see you got a double-decker bus and you’ve been in the coffee business.’

“He said, ‘You need to talk to Jerry in Utah.’ So I called Jerry in Utah. Jerry answered the phone and he said, ‘We gotta talk to Bob in England.’ So we called Bob in England. Bob says, ‘I think I’ve got something that will help.’ He says, in fact, it’s already been partially converted into a coffee shop.”

Dunford bought the bus and had it shipped to the U.S., to Savannah, Ga., where Jerry from Utah picked it up and drove it to its new home in Hampton Cove. Dunford has spent the last year getting it ready for business.

Dunford started The Grid as a place for food trucks to set up during COVID, as a way to pull the community together. He collaborated on the idea with long-time Cove resident Brad Garland and the community organization Cove Monkey. Garland is one of the organizers of Cove Monkey, a group of residents who help spread news and events for the good of the community.

“The Cove Monkey had a good connection with people who lived out there,” Garland explained, “and Russ had a space, so we collaborated to put on some good events with the food trucks and ‘Grub at the Grid.’”

Named after grid paper used by the many engineers in the Huntsville area, The Grid continues to be a gathering place for the Hampton Cove and Owens Cross Roads community. Passers-by can visit the pop-up farmers’ market, Nacho’s Mexican food truck and Rocket City Shaved Ice. Under construction also is a pole barn with a stage for live music.  

By day, Dunford is a data analyst for the Defense Acquisition University. Running The Grid is something he does to keep himself busy; he calls it his therapy away from his computer, using hammers, shovels and dirt to build and create a gathering place for his community. With his two daughters in college pursuing their careers, Dunford said he didn’t like being idle.

“I like to build stuff,” Dunford said. “My daughters are in school, and I tell people all the time the best job I ever had in my life is being a dad. I miss it. When the girls left for college, I was going to build a car wash and piece together these three different lots for traffic flow. People could drive through, so it’s accessible from 431 all the way through to Taylor Road.”

The car wash didn’t work out, but The Grid has been well received by the community. 

“The Grid theme kind of evolved into things that go,” Dunford explained.

Dunford acquired two jet engine cowlings, which he may convert into a unique winter heater, and a train car that he’s working with the City of Huntsville to convert into a shaved ice venue or restaurant. He plans to add a bright red British phone booth, which matches the bus, as the place where coffee-seekers place their drive thru orders.

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The Grid features an impressive set of attractions, including this 20th century train car that Russ Dunford is currently renovating

“I love to teach, and you bring kids here, and there’s a whole lesson you can talk about with the bus. The kids get to touch and see engineering. You’d think that bus would turn over very easily. Believe it or not, that bloody bus can go to almost 38 degrees before it’ll tip over. It defies engineering principles.

“You can teach a lesson on the train car about engineering,” Dunford continued. “Each of those sets of wheels weighs about 14 tons, so that’s about 28 tons, and the car itself weighs right at about 40 tons. It’s a pretty heavy chunk of steel. What’s amazing about that is, it was built in the 1930s. Nobody had an iPhone, nobody had an iPad, nobody had autocad. All they had was brute force and fire, and they figured out how to make those things.”

The Grid is not Dunford’s first nor only side venture. He and his two daughters have a patent for a baseball training device for kids. They also founded the cardboard toy brand Just the Box, which makes children’s toys out of cardboard, which teach engineering principles, and the trio has published several children’s books written by Dunford’s daughters when they were children. Dunford is also a math instructor for the Mathnasium learning center and runs a scholarship program that sends kids from his home state of West Virginia to Space Camp in Huntsville.

“Albert Einstein said, ‘If you have to choose between intelligence and imagination, take imagination.’ Because think about it, all that stuff on Star Trek, none of that worked. It was a hundred percent fiction. You know how they determined to make the tablet computer? Supposedly, as the story goes, Apple computer was asking folks, what’s one cool thing that you’d really like to have from Star Trek, and they said, we’d really like to have that tablet computer, because you could walk around, you could have it right there. And if you’re in a hospital today, that is the digital notebook of everybody on the medical staff.

“So you sit a kid down and you start letting them read or sitting in the train car, or you read a book about Thomas the Train or something and the wheels just start turning, and you never know what seed you’re planting and what they’re going to become. But we do know what will happen if you don’t educate. I am forever grateful for teachers. Without them we will fail as a nation. I can think of no other career that has such an impact.”

The Grid is currently open and hosting farmers markets every Saturday. For a full list of events or questions, please visit The Grid’s facebook page here

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