Pleasant Street is losing 2 stores

By BILL CHAISSON
Eagle Times

By BILL CHAISSON
Eagle Times
CLAREMONT — 23 Pleasant Street Art Gallery and Antiques is closing. It isn’t because business has been bad — quite the opposite — but rather a bit of bad luck. 

Owner Frank Sprague slipped on ice near the end of winter and did a number on his shoulder. He won’t be able to lift anything for awhile and in the art and antique business, you need to lift things.

Meanwhile, the Java Cup, also on Pleasant Street, closed its doors Sunday. However, attempts to reach owner Jesse Demars, who announced the closure on his Facebook page, were unsuccessful Tuesday.

At 23 Pleasant Street, with Sprague laid up, his wife, Heidi, has gotten behind the counter and they are in the process of selling as much of the stock as they can before the end of the month. 

The 23 Pleasant St. building, which the Spragues own, is slated to go on the auction block in early June.

The antiques dealer is perhaps better known in Claremont as the former principal of Stevens High School, a position he held from 2011 to 2014. 

Before that, he served as the director of student affairs at the school between 2006 and 2011. All told, Sprague’s career in education stretched over 25 years and before that he was in the restaurant business for a decade. 

Through it all he has been buying and selling art and antiques, which he described as “in his blood;” his father was an art dealer.

The Spragues purchased 23 Pleasant St. from the bank in February 2017. It had been empty and unheated for two years. 

“There are cast-iron roof drains,” said Sprague, “and they have some horizontal runs in them. Water froze there and split them. Water poured into the building. We had ‘water features’ on the floors.” 

The new owners got to work putting the former fitness center back into usable condition. His wife described re-purposing some of the old, rubberized fitness center flooring to cover the bevels made by the standing water. Much of the rest of the floor had to be recovered and all the walls were repainted. A space in the back of the building was designed to be a gallery space for exhibitions by local artists, but now it will never open.

Because their antiques business represented a change of use for the property, the Spragues needed to make the location conform to modern building codes. The address had been a fitness center and racquet ball courts for many years and some unpermitted work was done. Sprague offered the example of a rooftop furnace that had been installed without a safety rail. The entrances also needed to be updated to conform to Americans with Disabilities Act rules.

In November 2017, nine months after the purchase, the art and antique center opened its doors. 

“We didn’t get a lot of people from Claremont in here, actually,” Sprague said. “Ninety percent of the buyers were from out of state.” 

The antiques community, he said, is a strong word-of-mouth network. “[The opening of a new business] gets around pretty quickly.”

Sprague feels that Pleasant Street was a good location for his business, in part because there were other storefronts there selling used, vintage and antique merchandise. He made an analogy to Brimfield, Massachusetts, which has a string of antiques dealers along Route 20. 

“People don’t say there are too many other [businesses] there,” he said.

Sprague, in fact, had no criticism for downtown Claremont. He understood the necessity of bringing his building up to code, for example. 

He was, however, a little mystified by the habit of shop owners and employees using street parking for their vehicles. As it happens the City of Claremont is working on that particular issue.

Nancy Merrill, director of economic development for Claremont, said the planning and development department will be requesting $100,000 for pre-engineering for an overhaul of the infrastructure on the block of Pleasant Street just off Opera House Square. 

If the project is funded in June, said Merrill, the city will move quickly to applying for state and federal money next spring to do the actual work. This will include adding additional parking behind the commercial buildings, but also new sidewalks, utilities and street trees.

Merrill and her colleagues met recently with many of the Pleasant Street building owners, who reported five vacancies in the area. One building, which includes 54,000 square feet of space, was condemned by the city and vacated. It subsequently changed hands and the new owner is putting $9 million into it and “taking it right back to the studs.”

Sprague described the second and third floors of his building as “pretty rough,” and Merrill said there are additional challenges for anyone who wants to bring anything above the second floor up to code, especially to put to a residential use. 

But, she noted, people are doing it. The Goddard Block has been purchased by an out-of-town buyer using federal tax credits.

“The city center has a lot of heart in it,” Merrill said, “but the older buildings require more effort to full tenant them.” 

Downtown districts have to become destinations in their own right in order to be successful, said the economic development director. This means bringing in visitors from outside the community to supplement the spending of the local population with disposal incomes. No one downtown can compete with online prices, she said.

“Claremont has had some success,” said Merrill. “There are already some restaurants and shops that are bringing in people from out of town, and of course there this the opera house.” 

She said that an arts non-profit organization is planning to buy the vacant building next to city hall and it will offer music lessons there.

Next month, out-of-town visitors will have one less antiques dealer to visit on Pleasant Street, unless another dealer moves into the space. Sprague said that his improvements have made it into a “turn-key” property.

Sprague said that in addition to selling out of the store, he also made many transactions on line and out of town, and he will continue to do that after the store closes. 

“I found two Audubon portraits from the early 1800s,” he said, “and I sent them down to Cowan’s [Auctions] in Cincinnati because that’s where they needed to be.” 

He left open the possibility of returning to a storefront business after his shoulder heals but he said he wouldn’t be rehabilitating any more buildings.