This article by John Lippman was published by the Valley News on Feb. 22.
The 2010s was a downbeat decade for downtown Bradford.
Three of the town’s stalwart businesses, Perry’s Oil Service and appliance store, Hill’s 5 & 10, and crafts store North of the Falls all closed, leaving vacant storefronts along North Main Street. The avatar of lower expectations — a Subway franchise, a thrift store and a tattoo parlor — moved in.
Yet, over the past couple years and even in the past month, there is evidence of a turnaround in downtown Bradford with the arrival of new enterprises.
A coworking and event venue, The Space on Main, which opened in 2018 and now attracts more than 500 people per month, and a new home heating fuel distributor, Thomson Fuels, which now has more than 800 customers after 17 months in business on the former Perry’s property, are now entrenched on North Main Street.
Three more new stores have come in behind them.
In October, collectibles store Antique Junction relocated from White River Junction in to the former North of the Falls space. And just this month, a new apparel store, U-Neek Boutique, and a new gourmet cheese shop, Out of the Whey, opened next door to each other.
The retail storefronts are emerging alongside new dining options. The Little Grille opened Nov. 1, a few months after watering hole The River Bar — both are in the Bradford Mill building that held Alexander’s Restaurant and Pub until it closed last August.
Mixed signs of revival
It may be too soon to declare that Bradford is back, but things are looking up, according to local business leaders,
“There was this sense that downtown Bradford was dying,” said Mark Johnson, the longtime owner of Bliss Village Store and Deli on North Main Street, a favorite grab-and-go lunch counter.
Now, with five new businesses on North Main Street, “there’s a lot of positives going on,” Johnson said.
A lot of positives, but not all positive.
One of downtown’s marquee names — Copeland Furniture — is planning to move out of downtown, leaving a hole in a location that greets drivers as they approach from the south on Route 5.
And, in what many town residents see as the most painful cut yet, Aubuchon Hardware, which has been selling tools and building supplies in Bradford for 61 years, will close in March, adding a second vacant storefront at the north end of North Main Street.
“The community is absolutely sick about this,” said Paul Gallerani, whose family owns Farm-Way, the popular apparel, footwear and outdoor gear emporium on the outskirts of town. “Downtown is not going to be able to recover from this. Aubuchon is the anchor.”
Gallerani, a longtime Bradford businessman who once owned the building where Aubuchon is located, said he even called Aubuchon executives at the company’s headquarters in Westminster, Mass., to try to persuade them to change their mind.
Gallerani has helped to lead a campaign through the Bradford Business Association, which posted a plea on its Facebook page urging people to “not let this happen without raising your voice” and asking customers to contact the Aubuchon’s CEO to “ask (him) to give Bradford four more months, while we help build their business.”‘We tried to make it’
As of last week, however, Aubuchon, which has 104 stores in the Northeast, had not indicated it would be change its mind, citing ongoing losses associated with the Bradford store.
“From a financial perspective, it’s been a not-performing store for several years. We tried to make it financially viable. But some locations we can’t get to where we want to get them,” Justin Bicknell, Aubuchon’s regional director for Vermont and New York, said last week.
Bicknell said the store, which has seven employees, would begin a 50%-off liquidation sale the first week of March with a planned closing by the end of the month.
News of Aubuchon’s closing comes only a week after Bethel Mills announced that it is acquiring the Oakes Bros. hardware and building supply business on Route 5 in Bradford’s Lower Plain commercial district along with Fogg’s Hardware’s three locations in Fairlee, Woodsville and Norwich.
Bicknell said Bethel Mills’ expansion — the Bethel-based company explicitly said the Oakes Bros. and Fogg’s acquisitions are part of a strategic plan to expand its service territory — was unrelated to the decision to close the Bradford store.
“This decision was made a few weeks ago. We were unaware of anything about Bethel Mills,” Bicknell said.
Once Aubuchon is closed, it will leave a gap at the north end of downtown.
The building, which is owned by Aubuchon Realty, will have only one tenant, Blue Wave Tae Kwon Do, sandwiched between two empty storefronts.
Second careers
While a special team of employees dispatched to Aubuchon on Wednesday were combing through the store’s stock to select products to transfer to the hardware chain’s nearest Vermont stores in Windsor, St. Johnsbury, Barre and Montpelier, Jeri Martino was behind the counter of her cheese shop, Out of the Whey, during its first opening day of business.
Martino, a Bradford resident who retired after 16 years in administrative positions at the county office in North Haverhill, said hometown pride drove her to open her cheese store.
“I’ve always wanted to have something on my own, and it is important for me to do it in Bradford where I’ve lived for 25 years. I think it’s important to build up the town,” she said. “And I love cheese.”
Martino’s motivation is not unlike that of her business neighbor Andrea Zambon, who, after nearly 23 years of working as an office manager at commercial laundry service UniFirst in Lebanon, decided to open her “affordable fashion” shop U-Neek Boutique.
Describing herself as “a huge bargain shopper,” Zambon, of Newbury, Vt., said opening a store “has been one of those back-of-my-mind dreams when I got done with my office career.”
With prices for apparel ranging from $20 to $40 — “I’m affordable,” she explained — Zambon said she wanted to open on Bradford’s Main Street because of customer traffic passing through downtown.
“And I could be near my husband’s business,” noted Zambon, whose husband, Glenn Zambon, is a partner in Bradford-based Zambon Brothers Logging.
Moving furniture
Aubuchon’s closing comes just as another prominent downtown presence prepares to leave later this year for the Lower Plain.
Copeland Furniture, which occupies a three-story building and showroom at the south end of North Main, will move to the industrial park opposite Farm-Way on Route 25. Copeland has had a showroom downtown since 2000, when it acquired and renovated the approximately 7,000-square-foot structure that had formerly been the offices of software firm Bankwares.
The move does not represent an abandonment of Bradford but in fact should boost downtown business because the building’s new tenant, Orange East Supervisory Union, will have about 30 employees who will want to buy lunch or shop along Main Street, said Copeland Furniture owner Tim Copeland.
“There will actually probably be more foot traffic with OESU than with our store. We don’t see more than four to six visitors a day in the showroom. This is not a high-traffic business,” Copeland said.
He said he’s moving his store to the Industrial Park where “it will be immediately contiguous to our factory” and will make it “seamless to move furniture from the factory floor to the showroom.”
Copeland said the new location will allow the company to introduce “factory tours,” but he acknowledges that the big advantage in attracting customers will come from being “right across (the road) from Farm-Way,” which draws customers from all over the Twin States.
“That’s not a bad thing,” he said.
