The party is over for Party City in West Lebanon.
The party supply store that sells everything from canisters of helium for balloons to costumes in the Upper Valley Plaza is closing, creating another vacant retail space along the commercial Route 12A corridor.
“Party City routinely evaluates our portfolio of stores in response to ongoing consumer, market and economic changes that naturally arise in the business. After careful consideration, we have decided to close the West Lebanon store location this April,” a spokesman for the Rockaway, N.J.-based 900 store chain said via email.
Translation: The party store’s sales were subpar.
The store’s closing means there are now three vacant storefronts in Upper Valley Plaza after the Sears outlet closed in 2017 and a space adjacent to the new HomeGoods store is waiting for an Old Navy store to go in later this year.
Nearly every shopping plaza in West Lebanon currently has an unfilled vacancy as brick-and-mortar retail continues to lose ground to the internet. Upper Valley Plaza, the largest with 16 stores and restaurants, is owned by Massachusetts-based commercial property outfit WS Development.
A spokeswoman for the firm declined comment.
The coffee choices in Springfield have been slim — Dunkin’ Donuts or McDonald’s — but java aficionados finally can find a fresh cup of joe. A new cafe and roaster, Flying Crow Coffee, has opened on Main Street in the space formerly occupied by local Democratic Party offices and Computers by Ken.
Ben and Samantha Hills, transplants from Arizona who moved to Vermont with toddlers and now are embedding themselves in the Springfield community, are currently “soft opening” Flying Crow Coffee in preparation for an official opening on Saturday.
“Springfield really needed something like this,” Ben Hills said of opening the cafe and roasting business, adding that the Main Street just-stop-in location “allows me to be part of the larger community.”
Before opening the cafe, Hills got into the coffee business a year ago with a “roasting studio” underneath the cafe and now sells beans (Fair Trade Certified) to the Springfield Food Co-op, the Putney Food co-op, Flat Iron Exchange coffee house in Bellows Falls, the Copper Fox restaurant in Springfield and cafe Java Baba’s in Ludlow.
He’s in the process of gaining organic certification as well, he said.
“I’ve always been a foodie,” said Hills, who met his wife in culinary school. Over the years he’s worked as a brewer and real estate agent, but he said his discovery in 2006 that he could purchase fresh-roasted beans online “changed my life” and led to his passion for fine coffee.
He still has a day job consulting remotely for a software company as his small business percolates, but he said his move the Upper Valley has helped him find his calling.
“I had been looking for a passion to fulfill, and when we moved to Vermont by happenstance it led to roasting,” Hills said. “It felt like second nature to me, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”
After 30 years in the People’s United Bank building on Springfield’s Main Street, accounting firm Graham & Graham PC has relocated into new offices at 368 River St. in the commercial district outside town on Route 106.
Springfield native and firm President Jeff Graham said the move into the new 1,600-square-foot offices was necessitated by the Springfield Food Co-op’s upcoming purchase of the People’s United building downtown and its plans to relocate and occupy much of the space.
The new offices for the four-person staff are “a bit bigger” than old offices downtown, Graham said, “where we had to share a hall and a bath.” More than 60 area business owners and employees showed up for the ribbon-cutting on Feb. 20 that was combined with that month’s After Hours Chamber Business Mixer organized by the Springfield Regional Chamber of Commerce.
Graham & Graham opened a Concord office in 2005 and a Laconia, N.H., office in 2010. The firm has about 10 employees in total, Graham said, although it adds additional people during tax season.
A 1976 Springfield High School graduate who studied accounting at Plymouth State College in New Hampshire, Graham currently serves on the New Hampshire Board of Accountancy and previously served twice on Vermont Board of Public Accountancy.
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
