As first reported in C-VILLE on October 31, Mall stalwart The Hardware Store will soon wrap up its three-decade run and put away its toolboxes, condiments and all, for good. Owners Stan and Marilyn Epstein have sold the four-storey building, which houses not only their restaurant but a number of smaller businesses like Race Jewelers and Art Upstairs. They plan to do their last day of business on December 30.
At 20,157 square feet, the building is sizable, stretching all the way from the Mall to Water Street. Its likely selling price is even bigger. Though neither the Epsteins nor buyer Octagon Partners have yet revealed a figure, the building is assessed at $1,337,300 (which represents just over 16 percent of the total assessment value of its block). To give one example of how sale prices commonly outpace assessment: Another major purchase by Octagon, the Gleason property on Garrett Street, sold in 2005 for $3.45 million after being assessed at only $1.68 million.
The Hardware Store, as Stan Epstein recalled in an interview last summer, was the first restaurant on the Mall, opening in 1976 when “you could have shot a cannon down the Mall and not hit anyone.” It took its name from the other landmark business that had occupied the site since 1895. “During the first several years,” Epstein remembered, the store drew “octogenarians saying, ‘My mother brought me in here.’”
Though there’s no word yet on Octagon’s plans for the site, it is zoned for up to nine storeys. City Council and other planners have expressed concern about the prospect of too much towering development on the Mall, so a nine-storey proposal would certainly face plenty of red tape. Still, if Downtown trends are any indication, the folksy feel of both the Hardware Store and its hardware-store predecessor probably won’t be in evidence regardless of what happens to the site.
