Still Alive And Doing Business On Main Street | Retailers find new reasons to be downtown
In 1970, when Steven Duvarney’s grandfather and father decided to expand the family’s Clinton-based jewelry business, they turned to Main Street in Fitchburg for a second location.
“In the ‘60s, in North County, Fitchburg was the city where there was the most active commerce,” Duvarney said.
Today Duvarney Jewelers still has a location at 457 Main St. in Fitchburg, but the street is no longer a shopping hot spot. Storefront spaces there are less likely to house retail destinations than nail salons or take-out restaurants — or nothing at all. That’s true to a greater or lesser extent of many downtown areas in Central Massachusetts and across the country.
In almost every downtown there are a handful of stores that have stayed or moved in, even as shoppers have emptied out. In some cases, they’ve found that there are reasons to be downtown that are entirely unrelated to the 1960s vision of a walkable central shopping district.
Changed Landscape
Like Duvarney, Allen’s department store at 26 Main St. in Leominster is a family business. It’s been in the city for 100 years, and in the last two years it’s opened two additional locations, one in Worcester and another in Warwick, R.I. But President Tucker Allen said the business is very different than it was decades ago.
“You have to know who your market is and go out and get them,” he said. “The customer doesn’t necessarily physically walk in the store anymore. It’s more like they shop online or you go out and service them in other ways outside of the store.”
Allen said a big part of the business these days is selling uniforms and customized products to local schools and corporate clients. He said the business has three employees dedicated to going out on the road to make sales.
If the Main Street location no longer guarantees a steady stream of walk-in customers, Allen said it’s good in other ways. It’s a central location for the company’s headquarters that makes it easy to get out to the two satellite stores. And it’s right near the Leominster post office, which makes shipping easy.
The company owns the 30,000-square-foot space, which gives it plenty of room to grow. Allen said it may renovate an unused part of the property to use as a distribution center.
Shift From Retail
At 229-year-old Elwood Adams Hardware at 156 Main St. in Worcester, manager Fran Neale said the store’s physical location is no longer terribly important to his customers either. That’s because, since the rise of big-box stores like Lowe’s and Home Depot, Elwood doesn’t do much traditional retail business.
Neale said 85 percent to 90 percent of the store’s business is with big clients — schools, hospitals, construction companies. People who work at the courthouse across the street may stop by to buy a box of nails on their lunch break, but that’s not the main revenue driver anymore.
“In a sense, it really doesn’t matter where we are,” Neale said.
That’s also somewhat true of Shack’s Fine Clothing, a men’s store just a few blocks away at 403 Main St.
Michael Shack, a third-generation member of the family business, said the shop gets business from people who work downtown — lawyers and people working in finance, mainly. But he said many customers also make a point to seek the shop out even if they don’t work nearby because “we do things the old-fashioned way.”
Shack said the location isn’t just about the store itself. The business owns the building and rents the third and fourth floors to pro bono legal organizations.
“They like having their landlord underneath them,” Shack said.
He said the shop pays for itself, but without the added incentive of having tenants upstairs, there might be less reason to stay in the location.
Shack said the problems that make downtown a less-than-ideal location have been building for a long time and it may be impossible to fix them at this point.
“There’s no cure, there just isn’t,” he said. “If you had enough money to go into business, which is substantial, I’m not so sure you’d pick downtown.”
Downtown Vs. The Mall
But, back in Leominster, Allen points out that some downtowns are different, and he sees setting up a retail operation on some main streets as a smart move. He said his kids, who are in their 20s, embrace the idea of a viable city center.
“I think the next generation would much prefer having a downtown, whereas my generation really was enamored with the malls,” he said.
And Allen said there are basic conveniences associated with a central location like downtown Leominster, like being able to meet different people easily.
“Just knowing the people in the city hall,” he said. “They all can make your business work a little better.”
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