Petula Clark sang about a downtown where you can go “when you’re alone and life is making you lonely.”
Westport’s downtown is getting a little more lonely — at least for family-owned businesses. This morning, WestportNow reports that — after 85 years — Achorn’s is leaving. Its new location: Playhouse Square. Its reason: “extremely high rent.”
A Main Street fixture for decades -- and a sight soon to vanish. (Photo/Joseph Cole for The Daily Westport)
Coupled with the relocation of Liquor Locker (to Compo Shopping Center), there will soon be only 3 independently owned businesses on Main Street, WestportNow says: Oscar’s, Westport Pizzeria and Francois DuPont Jewelers.
Toss in the consolidation of Talbots — it’s abandoned the original Remarkable Book Shop building on the corner of Main Street and Parker Harding Plaza, and move all its women’s wear into the former (and connected) Record Hunter store next door — and Main Street will soon have a decidedly different look, and feel.
Is it one that’s — in Petula Clark’s words — “alone and lonely”? Or are “extremely high rents,” the disappearance of family-owned stores, and the proliferation and/or consolidation of chains simply the way of the 2012 world?