Empty shelves line the walls at Cave Taureau in downtown Durham.
The last month for Durham's burgeoning retail scene suddenly suggested a worrisome trend.
In May, Nice Price Books went out of business on Broad Street. And then, in mid-June, the excellent downtown wine shop Cave Taureau, situated on the ring of the Five Points intersection for the last four years, slashed prices and announced its own imminent departure, citing an impending rent increase and slumping sales. Were there too many stores for too few customers?
Alongside Duke's east campus, Nice Price was at the end of a sixteen-year run, its owner ready to retire. But Cave Taureau was just getting started, with shelves full of a wide variety of wines and bitters and beers, thoughtfully stocked by owner Noel Sherr. When Cave Taureau opened in November 2012, Sherr and his wife, Marie, and their two business partners knew they were taking a substantial risk. But Cave Taureau quickly attracted new business as a relatively early adopter of downtown Durham's retail possibilities.
"Downtown Durham was starting to get the energy. We wanted to be part of the revival," Sherr says, noting that Cave Taureau carried many of the food-friendly wines featured in nearby restaurants that could be hard to find in other shops. "We felt like what we were doing belonged here."
But as downtown's parking crunch escalated, sales declined. Then Cave Taureau's building was sold, which means a sharp increase in rent when the current lease ends in 2017. The new owner will need to charge market rate for the storefront space, and the downtown Durham landscape has changed radically in four years.
Sherr made the decision to exit now rather than risk more losses. He's "not happy losing money," he says, philosophically, "but I'm zero percent regretful."
Although Cave Taureau couldn't stay afloat, its arrival downtown represented a mission statement of sorts: that independent merchantspassionate and knowledgeable about their goodswanted to be part of a rejuvenated city center's magnetism.
The acclaimed Durham restaurant boom has largely fueled the downtown renaissance. Five years ago, downtown was mostly empty after dark. Now, it bustles almost every night, but that's not quite enough, the core's new retailers agree.
"We need to give people something to do during the day," says Jennings Brody, who owns Chet Miller, the handsome, superbly selected gifts and furnishings emporium on Parrish Street. A decade ago, she opened the food retailer Parker & Otis a half mile away, and she will soon launch Tiny, a children's store, in the space beside Chet Miller. "When you come to a city, you can't eat the whole time."
Brody's retail gamble with Chet Miller is part of a new wave of commerce meant to follow those restaurants.
"Retail is inevitable," says Gabriel Eng-Goetz, who owns Runaway, a new fashion and lifestyle boutique beneath the 21C Museum Hotel on Main Street. "People don't really come downtown to shop." But they will, he hopes. "It's definitely a risk," he says, "but it's a calculated one."
Part of that calculation is feel. Downtown retailers frequently use words like "energy" and "vibe," suggesting a spirit they want to tap into and feed, even if it means waiting for an increase in sustainable residential and tourist density, the latter already higher thanks to the arrival of 21C and the Durham Hotel.
"This block has really good juju," says Brody, standing on Parrish Street.
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From the front door of Chet Miller, Brody looks directly at the elephant in the roomor, in local parlance, the bull lumbering into the china shop: One City Center, today a hole in the ground, but someday a twenty-seven-story high-rise. With the concurrent renovation of the Jack Tar Hotel across Parrish Street, it constitutes a present disruption and future change of a size, scope, and potential impact that Durham has rarely if ever seen.
These building projects have escalated downtown's bothersome but temporary lane closures (from a water main replacement) into an unremitting chaos of construction, pedestrian peril, closed streets, choked traffic, andthe retailer's worst nightmareinsufficient parking.
In an otherwise high-spirited moment, parking, that most spiritless of forces, is causing constant commercial trouble. Accessibility problems played a significant role in Cave Taureau's demise.
"Wine's heavy," Sherr says simply. Over time, his customers had a harder time finding parking near the shop; many of them gave up even trying. The mere perception of tough parking, even if not entirely true, kept people away. The business he expected from the nearby American Tobacco Campus rarely arrived. He discovered that, at day's end, workers would get in their cars and return to the Durham Freeway rather than try to get closer to his shop.
One City Center and the Jack Tar won't be finished soon, and construction has yet to begin on a new parking deck on the north side of the downtown loop. Things will surely get worse before they get better, though, in September, the city will begin installing parking meters downtown, which officials believe will help ease the parking crunch.
Nevertheless, "this isn't just about parking," says city council member Steve Schewel, "and it's important that it not be."
Still, how will fresh shoots of downtown retail avoid Cave Taureau's fate? Some have better anchorage; Runaway and Carolina Soul Records are small retail imprints of much larger wholesale and online concerns. Others rent from sympathetic, financially flexible owners who are willing to offer favorable lease terms. Still others own their buildings, like Dolly's Vintage, which moved downtown five years ago and became something of a pioneer. Ditto Vert & Vogue and the homey new downtown grocery Bulldega, a family business. Profits go back into the building, not to a landlord.
Jennifer Donner, who owns Dolly's, says she wouldn't have moved downtown from Brightleaf Square had she and her husband not owned the building at 213 West Main. But business, she says, is strong and evolving. She's made subtle changes to the inventory in response to Durham's current consumer demographics, with more new merchandise and less vintage wares in the front of the store.
Likewise, Land Arnold, the owner of Letters Bookshop, has adopted a similar adaptability since opening nearly three years ago. He's added more new books to his used stock, and a prominent table offers recent hardcovers, which he hadn't planned to sell at all, at a standing 20 percent off.
Brody and Donner go for regular walks around downtown, taking stock of the sea change and brainstorming ways to withstand it. Donner is unclear on answers, but she is certain that such small businesses need the city's help.
They've gotten some, but need more. Downtown Durham Inc.'s Walk Your City signage campaign is a start and needs expansion "to install signage that lets visitors know that businesses are open during construction," according to an official from the Office of Public Affairs. Schewel adds, "There's an obligation on the part of the developers to make people aware of how to get to these stores."
Until that obligation is better met, the city is struggling to keep retailers updated on street closures and other impediments. Brody recently found the sidewalk outside Chet Miller blocked by Jack Tar construction crews without warning. She wrote an email to the city council, which helped find a partial solution.
"We keep hearing that we have to hold on for a happier tomorrow," Arnold says, citing the completion of One City Center. "But it has to happen today."
Schewel advocates for the improvement of "supportive infrastructure"such as bike and bus accessibility, and sidewalk improvementfor which the city has earmarked funds.
Still, downtown's boom is happening so fastand nearly all at once, it seemsthat virtually no municipal government could hope to manage all of its vectors.
Retail is mostly left to its own Darwinian course. "Since downtown is hot now," Schewel says, "the city's need to incentivize [small business] is shrinking. Our retailers are at the mercy of real and powerful market forces. I worry that the same forces making Durham less affordable in terms of housing are making it unaffordable for retail."
And as downtown Durham continues to grow, its informal but strong consortium of local businesses will soon face the encroachment of chains. Rents in the designated retail spaces in the new developments will be 50 percent to 100 percent higher than the current downtown rate, some shopkeepers have learned. Only empires with deep pockets can afford that overhead.
A few chains might not be so bad. If, say, an Urban Outfitters arrived, "it would pull the mall audience downtown," Runaway's Eng-Goetz says. Dolly's is planning a collaboration with Anthropologie. As more people move downtown, they'll need the conveniences that, by nature, chains can provide.
"I get it," Brody says. "It needs to happen."
But there's no juju in a CVS.
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Cave Taureau was one move in a very long game, one with much older beginnings. Encouragingly, it's still being played by one of its originators, at least for now.
Ward Furniture stands at 407 East Chapel Hill Street. The owner, Emmett Ward Jr., started working there fifty years ago for his father, who founded it in 1948 next door, now the home of Merge Records. A picture of Emmett's father hangs over the counter, above an old Zenith logo.
The business has seen both the midcentury downtown boom and its post-Vietnam bust. The building has no air conditioning, and it doesn't appear to have been renovated since central air conditioning was popularized. Only the furniture looks new, although its design is resolutely dated.
At eight o'clock on a Thursday morning, Emmett is already open for business, doing paperwork. His lone assistant, Donald Powell, dozes on a sofa; soon, the business of loading and delivering will rouse him into action. Ward has a loyal network of longtime customers, both inside the city center and out. Quietly, it's one of downtown's most successful retail operations.
But Emmett knows it can't last much longer. His rental terms are so favorable they're practically the result of neglect. He isn't even sure who owns the building; it's in the hands of a bank trust, he says, and he writes his monthly rent check to a management company. The rate increases a little every year. This arrangement will eventually come to an end, and his prime downtown location is almost sure to transform into something shiny to match the surrounding zeitgeist: Merge, Dashi, Alley Twenty Six.
But he's sanguine about the coming change. He's seventy-one, and his children have chosen careers outside the furniture business.
"When the lights go out," he says, "the party's over."
He's sanguine about the future of downtown retail, too, if a tad skeptical. Retail is a hard business, he admits. You have to show up every day, for all hours. You must sell good products. You must know those products, too. And you have to build relationships with your customers.
No, some of the retail newcomers won't last, but they seem to share a certain necessary spirit. These are people, not just businesses, and they care about what they do.
To wit, Brody stands outside Chet Miller. Fumes from painting her new children's store space have set off the smoke alarm. Why deal with this tower of obstacle, hassle, and debt?
She looks out over the One City Center construction site, then back at her store: "Because this is what I love."
This article appeared in print with the headline "Bull or Bust"
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Photo by Alex Boerner
Noel Sheer has operated Cave Taureau, a wine shop on Main Street in downtown Durham for about four years.
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Photo by Alex Boerner
Jenny Leinbach grabs a bottle of wine off the shelf at Cave Taureau in Durham.
