Bangor neighborhood store closes temporarily

BANGOR – Walking can be difficult for Edward “Butch” Myshrall, 47, after a boyhood accident left him with three slipped disks in his back.

So news that his neighborhood store, the Eastside Market, on the corner of Garland and Grove streets, was closing was not a welcome development.

“It hurts,” Myshrall said bluntly, standing outside the store in the heat of Saturday afternoon.

Myshrall, whose long white hair and beard lend themselves handily to his reoccurring role at Christmastime, said he uses the store daily, buying food and supplies for himself as well as for older people who can’t make the trek themselves.

The store is a place for people to meet, talk, and catch up on the news, said Myshrall, who lives three houses down from the business. He said he could buy groceries at the store on credit on his word that he would pay his bill.

But after five years of the store being run by his family, Richard Fye is calling it quits. He didn’t want to talk about the decision, leaving an explanation to patrons in a note on the door simply stating that because of illness the store was closing today.

The closure of the market is expected to be short-lived. The owner of the property, state Sen. Joe Perry, D-Bangor, said on Friday that a neighborhood market would reopen in the spot where one has operated for a century or more.

Perry said his mother and grandmother have lived on Grove Street and always remember a store being there under one name or another.

“There is so much foot traffic, so many people depend on that store on a regular basis who get there on foot that I feel it’s important,” said Perry, who expected to have a new tenant in by Labor Day. If there isn’t, Perry said he will open a store himself. Perry ran the store for 10 years until it competed too much for his time as a legislator.

The store faces competition of its own.

In an age of expanding supermarket chains, discount department stores offering food, and gas station convenient stores, neighborhood stores may be a dying breed.

“I think it’s a remnant of a bygone era,” Bangor Code Enforcement Officer Dan Wellington said Friday.

Wellington has a warm appreciation for the stores. He remembered as a boy in the mid-1960s breaking off summer baseball games at Second Street Park to cool off at the convenience store nearby.

In high school, he stocked beer and soda at Brownie’s Market, one of three neighborhood stores along a short stretch of Main Street between where Gold Star Cleaners and Spanky’s Pizza are now.

Then there was the Third Street market, Emery’s Market on Seventh Street, Ruby’s market on Patten Street and Reynolds Market on Buck Street. Most were small stores that relied heavily on foot traffic, including young boys on their way home from school who stopped to pick up baseball cards or a soda.

Where once there seemed to be a neighborhood market in every neighborhood, now only a handful remain.

Wellington said he thinks the decline began in the 1970s with the influx of Green Gables and then Nite Owl convenience stores, offering expanded hours – sometimes around the clock – and upping the ante for small convenience stores which also faced competition from the growing chain of supermarkets.

“The little mom-and-pop operations really struggled to keep up with them,” Wellington said.

Some stores, such as Fairmount Market on Hammond Street, evolved, adding a delicatessen and takeout sandwiches and pizza to help survive.

For Perry, the Eastside Market, previously operated as McDonald’s Market, has survived due in great part to its location. He said it attracts a broad spectrum of customers, from lower income to the middle-class residents of the “tree streets” and the homes of professionals living near St. Joseph Hospital.

“It always got a pretty interesting cross-section of people going in there,” he said.

That Perry intended to keep the store open was welcome news to Patricia Turcic, 50, who lives on Pine Street. With no access to a car, she takes a bus to a Hannaford supermarket and supplements those trips with walks to the Eastside Market, which tide her over until she makes another run to the supermarket, Turcic said Saturday.

Turcic likes the idea of having a variety of sources to shop and said it’s probably too soon to sound the death knell for the small stores. She said she has noticed that Hannaford is going upscale and along with that are the stores’ prices, she said, making the neighborhood store prices a little more competitive.

“The gap is closing,” Turcic said from inside the air-conditioned comfort of the Garland Street Laundry, just down the street from the market. “They’re not so much more expensive than they used to be.”

For Perry, the best predictor of the future for the little store may be the past.

“There’s been a store there forever and there will continue to be one there,” Perry said.