There’s so much that I love in this story, published in the Globe today, about a man’s effort to convert a century-old abandoned building into a community bike repair and coffee shop. Noah Hicks De Amor grew up in Bowdoin-Geneva, where for decades shootings have run at rates three or four times greater than other Boston neighborhoods. A multi-part Globe story in 2012 took a long look at the neighborhood’s deep-rooted troubles but also at the optimism and determination of its residents. De Amor embodies those values. As a teenager, he took up bike repair as a hobby. Later, he became a charter-school Latin teacher, but never gave up his work on bikes, eventually founding the Bowdoin Bike School, a community repair shop, as a shoestring popup that evolved into a storefront. Dreaming of expansion, De Amor worked with Historic Boston Inc., a nonprofit that works to repurpose at-risk historic buildings, to identify a good place to open a welcoming bike repair shop and coffee shop. They pointed him to a long-abandoned “comfort station” — a briefly popular euphemism for a public bathroom — that was originally built in 1912-13 to serve riders on the streetcar lines that then connected the neighborhood to the rest of the city. The transformation effort is approaching success. If it wins a voting contest co-sponsored by National Geographic and the National Trust for Historic Preservation, its chances of becoming reality get even better.