The former Anderson’s Cafe building on First North Street soon will have a new occupant.

The Vicksburg Board of Zoning Appeals voted 4-0 Tuesday to rezone the property from two-family residential to general commercial, for a tax service/bill payment center in the building at 807 First North St.

Jacqueline Peoples, 110 Moonmist Drive, owner of Protax Etc. LLC, said the business will provide income tax services, take bill payments and sell money orders and pre-paid cell phones. She plans to renovate the building and open her business in early July.

“I’m going to start working on it this weekend,” she said.

Peoples said she bought the building in February from GSP Enterprises of Canton, which is owned by Gwendolyn Spencer Prater, a daughter of Louis Spencer, one of the founders of the Red Tops Band, who died in August 2010. City zoning administrator Dalton McCarty said no business had been in the building since 2008.

Spencer tried to have the building reopened as a club in 2009, but the board and the Board of Mayor and Aldermen refused to allow it.

Built in 1940, Anderson’s Cafe was a landmark on First North Sreet.

“That building was there when I was growing up,” said Charles Marshall, 70, who lives across the street, at 810 First North. “It’s one of my childhood memories. It was a place where a family could go eat lunch or dinner and you could have a beer.

“The house where the Andersons, who ran the cafe, lived, was behind the cafe. It was a nice place,” he said.

Marshall, who left the area for nine years, said when he returned to the neighborhood to retire, the cafe was a different place, saying he remembered shootings and other criminal activity. He said the Andersons’ house is still standing, adding he sees homeless people going to it daily.

Spencer, who owned the building for more than 30 years, tried in July 2009 to get the board to override a decision by McCarty that prohibited the reopening of the building for use as a neighborhood night club.

The building, which is in a residential area, was already in the neighborhood when it was zoned residential in the 1970s, and allowed to remain open as a non-comforming use.

The cafe, which was being operated as a club by another person at the time, closed in 2008. Under city zoning regulations, a business not located in a commercial area cannot reopen after it is closed for more than 60 days.