By TERRY PARKHURST

David Barnes didn't start out to be an espresso seller.

It was simply that, after working in banking since 1985, and while going through a divorce in 1993, he decided he needed to try something different, something people-oriented but allowing more creativity.

That something became a business he started called The Bus Stop Espresso.

But The Bus Stop isn't just about coffee - it's also about people and it's about animals, too. On most weekend mornings, customer Pete Mills is there with his dachshund mix, Phoebe.

Another customer, known only as John, comes in with his pet bird, Sundance,tucked in his jacket and trots the bird out to give him espresso, during the workweek.

The Bus Stop is housed in a unique building with its name in neon and with a bus logo modeled on the streamlined bus concept of the late architect and visionary Buckminster Fuller.

Located in the Roosevelt District, at the busy intersection of 8th Avenue NE and NE 65th Street, until 1995, the building housed a photocopy business called the Copy Mart.

Barnes started out with a little cart set up outside the Copy Mart from which he sold espresso to the shop's patrons. He sold 50 cups of coffee the first day from his cart. He admits that the hardest time was the first 30 days. He'd sometimes get up at 3:30 in the morning, load the cart himself onto a trailer and take it down to his leased plot. Things got better when he was able to put the cart inside at night.

Barnes put up a canopy and that helped make his place a destination stop for people on their way to work or just jumping on the freeway.

When the Copy Mart moved out in 1995, Barnes bought the building. There was a lot of work involved in retrofitting the building into a restaurant.

Barnes, his brother and friends had to jackhammer a 40 foot long trench, working through 12 inches of concrete, to take the plumbing back to where the sewer lines are.

Darrell Minor, a customer who still does a lot of landscaping around the restaurant, put in a walkway and ran a watering hose for the plants over where Barnes put in a window for drive-up espresso.

In the fall of 1996, business inexplicably slowed down. A technician working on the espresso machines suggested that what was needed was a theme, something to attract customers with money but more importantly, style.

Barnes met artist Chris Rayman and a friend of his, John Wessel, came up with the distinctive logo. Barnes, a long-time bus aficianado, started to collect bus memorobilia and put those items on display.

Today, the kitchen is now shielded to make the environment more akin to being in one's home. Some pastries are bought, but much of the food is prepared by Cindy Deeters, a North Seattle Community College culinary arts student.

"I love it," says Deeters of The Bus Stop. "It's full of laughs. People come in and are so out of it until they get their coffee. It's really laid back."

Barnes' strong right hand in The Bus Stop is his wife Jacqui. He met her at a party in 1992. She was taken aback that he was sitting there, amidst the noise, reading a "Business Week" magazine; so she came over and talked to him. After months of courting, they married in October 1995, shortly before taking over the former Copy Mart building.

Asked what attracted him to her, David says, "She seemed motivated and strong."

That sense of motivation has led her to not only finish her degree at the University of Washington and help David raise two children and adopt a dog, but to also get involved in Tomorrow's Roosevelt and enroll in a two-year degree program for interactive media at Bellevue Community College, which she is still involved in.

David Barnes, who heads up the Roosevelt Chamber of Commerce has also been instrumental in giving input to Sound Transit (formerly known as the Regional Transit Authority or RTA) to protect local merchants. Sound Transit has proposed eventually constructing a light rail line that would bisect the Roosevelt neighborhood. The Bus Stop Espresso has been the starting point of tours of the neighborhood by various politicians, including County Councilwoman Cynthia Sullivan.

But Barnes' involvment with politics and the creation of a uniquely designed business is anchored in David Barnes' belief that, "I look at The Bus Stop as a place where everybody knows your name, where everybody has a place to come and feel comfortable. My employees take that to heart."