The New Cottage Street

Classic Easthampton thoroughfare now offers one-stop shopping for home decorators (surprise!)

From the Daily Hampshire Gazette Home Magazine - October 2003

Patricia Duda was ready for a change. She'd endured her living room's plain white walls since she bought the house, and even the windows and furnishings seemed listless.

"I've lived here since 1980 - it's an older house in an older neighborhood - and I'd been at a complete loss," Duda said. "God knows why, but I just hit a wall, creatively."

That is until this year, when the lifelong Easthampton resident saw her friend's living room light up with a slipcover and upholstery makeover shepherded by local interior designer Keith Woodruff. Duda also had been impressed with Woodruff's storefront at 82 1/2 Cottage St., which features traditional, contemporary and eclectic furnishings and appointments.

From there, Duda said, everything fell into place.

"Keith was great. He came to my house, and we talked, and he gave me some ideas, and then he did the follow-up work to bring everything together," she said.

"We brightened up my living room with a lovely gold paint in a faux finish, kind of a French country look for a little punch. And I purchased an armoire for an entertainment center, got some great lamps, and slipcovered my couch and my chair," Duda said. "I finally have a room I like."

The next step: window treatments. "I want to at least get that done so that I can say that I'm done with Keith for a while until my next urge," Duda said.

When a city remodels
This is an increasingly familiar story on Cottage Street, which has just emerged from a spectacular renovation of its own. Since clarifying their vision and goals for a vibrant city in 1998, Easthamptonites secured a $400,000 grant from the state Department of Housing and Community Development. As the Gazette reported in February, the Valley Community Development Corp. funneled $170,000 in loans to startup businesses from the Western Massachusetts Enterprise Fund and other sources.

What residents and merchants did with the funds is remarkable. Businesses and homes share this newly landscaped, picturesque stretch of Route 141 from Nashawannuck Pond to performing arts-space Flywheel, the shops clad in mill-era brick, glass and pressed tin.

In a story familiar to Northamptonites, postindustrial decay gave way to a hard-won renaissance, and business is brisk.

Arguably the heart of the new Cottage Street is the reclaimed 1920s Majestic Theater, which new owner Jo Roessler adapted into 10,000 square feet of five crisp, inviting workshops and storefronts, all steeped in New England charm. Roessler, who had been renting studio space at Eastworks (a community of businesses, artisans and professionals based at the former Stanley Home Products factory on Pleasant Street), spent seven months renovating the theater, raising and leveling sloped floors and uncovering pressed tin walls and ceilings and other original architectural details.

The property is home to landlord Jo Roessler's furniture studio, Nojo Design; Woodruff's KW Home store; cabinetmaker Peter Garlington's studio; Helena Sullivan Photography; and a countertop materials showroom called On the Surface.

"It's really happening," said Woodruff. "There are great new restaurants here, I'm open two nights a week because of all the foot traffic, and people are making note that we're a business district.

Shoppers have choices
Cottage Street also boasts the Nashawannuck Gallery, Cab's Antiques, the venerable National Carpet One, which has anchored Cottage Street since 1947, and even R-Kade, which sells vintage pinball and upright video games. Practically everything a window shopper or home decorator could want is here - including restaurants, pubs and plenty of free off-street parking, thanks to Majestic owner Jo Roessler selling the theater parking lot to the city.

A place for everything
"Things have turned around enormously. People are looking for vacant storefronts as opposed to landlords looking for tenants," said Roessler, surrounded by furniture projects under construction. His studio is expansive and airy. It used to be the Majestic's screening room.

"When I bought it, the building was unheated and unwired, and there were gaping holes in the roof that let the rain and snow in. It had every kind of problem imaginable," Roessler said. "If I had any idea of the scope of this project going into it, I probably wouldn't have done it."

But, he said, he's glad he did. He'd outgrown Eastworks and the life of a renter. As he took stock of Nojo Design's commissioned projects - a bed frame, a built-for-two partners' desk in cherry and bubinga (an African wood known for its wild swirls and bold figures), a dining room table and chairs, an ash sideboard, and a cherry-and-walnut step tantsu chest - Roessler explained why Cottage Street works.

"It's got a nice synergy. The only way for it to work is if we all do it together. For example, if I have a client come in from out of town, the first place I'm going to send him is [Smokin Lil's BBQ] next door. And when there's a line for a restaurant outside, I get people looking in my window."

And it's fun, he said.

"I can look into what was a dead little candy store, and now Helena [Sullivan] has a great portrait studio there. I see Keith [Woodruff] is busy, and he has customers ask, 'What's that noise back there?' So he sends them to my workshop. The place is alive; there's a pulse that everyone feeds off of," Roessler said.

Helena Sullivan flashes forward
At 84 1/2 Cottage St., Helena Sullivan shows off the wedding and family portraits that helped bring her photography studio into focus as a going concern. She put out her shingle in 2001 as a newly minted graduate of Turners Falls-based Hallmark Institute of Photography.

"I worked in retail a long time, and I've done it all. I guess I worked one Christmas too many," Sullivan said, happy to be in business for herself.

Hallmark's intensive 10-month photography program proved a sound investment, Sullivan said. She emerged with both the school's award for best portrait portfolio of the year and a blue ribbon from the Professional Photographers Association of New England.

Sullivan also proved expert in Hallmark's business coursework. She knew she had a great business plan and - on Cottage Street - a great location.

"I started looking for a location while I was in school: something cute, with a reasonable price. People were still moving out of Cottage Street, but there was talk of things getting better. And I've lived in Easthampton for about 13 years; my kids go to school here," she said. "I definitely knew something was up."

She said she briefly considered setting up shop in Northampton.

"It's so expensive there. And Northampton is overdone, or oversaturated, or oversomething."

Right now Sullivan is a one-woman enterprise, shooting family portraits, weddings and senior portraits with apparent grace and joy. She's comfortable in color and black and white, and is phasing out wet chemistry for fully digital production.

"I really wish I could have a secretary, someone to do all the office-y stuff, so I could do more artsy stuff," she said. "I'm right on the verge of that; I could almost use someone for that."

As exciting as life is on Cottage Street, Sullivan said, she's aware that any business venture entails risk.

"Most new businesses go under within five years. I figure I've got three more," she said.

Carpet One takes the long view
A few doors down at 90 Cottage St., Nyome Garren, National Carpet One's sales manager of 15 years, surveys the view of a bright, clean street and bustling storefronts. She said she likes what she sees.

"There were a lot of vacant storefronts. They were tacky, shoddy and dilapidated. The new theater owner has been a blessing: He transformed it and took down the marquee, which was dangerous in my opinion," Garren said.

"At night on weekends you won't find any parking, it's so busy out. And in the day it's nice to see a lot of foot traffic."

National Carpet One has seen it all. The store has been in operation on Cottage Street since 1947, and most of its 18 employees have been moving flooring products here for years - even decades - to homeowners, commercial clients and institutional builders.

"We're the only carpet store in Easthampton, and about 70 percent of our business is word of mouth, repeat business. Which is good - that's ideally what you want," Garren said.

The store specializes in carpet, vinyl, laminate; ceramic, hardwood and area rugs, Garren said, but customers have been interested in hardwoods and berbers lately. (Berbers have thicker yarns than other level-loop pile carpets, and limit footprints and vacuum tracks.)

"People are interested in durability. That's very hot right now," Garren said.

For all the improvements on the street, though, it's something money can't buy that moves Garren.

"I never tire of rounding the corner and seeing Nashawannuck Pond and [Mount Tom]," she said. "It's beautiful in winter with the ice and snow. Sometimes I take my ice skates down there and skate during a break," she said. "I'd even kayak if I had the time."

Shopping, living, locally
For her part, Patricia Duda, whose living room Keith Woodruff helped bring back to life, says she's prepared to spend more money in town, where it belongs.

"Before Cottage Street took off, we would bemoan the fact that we had to go out of town to shop, and we still have to go out of town for a lot of things, but to know we can walk to a restaurant and relax - that's excellent. We don't need another Northampton. Easthampton is up and coming."

The author, John Snyder, is a freelance writer living in Shelburne Falls. He can be reached at jsnyder@gazettenet.com. This article is reprinted here with the permission of the Daily Hampshire Gazette.