Home Care In Falls Church, VA

The little brass bell on the door of Brown’s Hardware jingled — just like it had for 142 years — as the first customers of the day walked in.

Merchandise like wire strippers, work gloves and ball valves occupied every inch of the store not long ago, but were mostly gone now. Johnny Cash and June Carter’s song “Jackson” hummed from the stereo in the back.

A shopper and a clerk were talking. Then came hugs.

This wasn’t just the end of a store. This was the loss of a community’s anchor.

Owner John Taylor, 73, had witnessed this bond between his business and its customers for years. Northern Virginia has experienced several decades of commercial and residential development. Some small businesses have struggled to compete and had to close.

But Brown’s managed to hang on.

With the store now shutting down, Taylor found himself with no inventory to count, no orders to place and no shelves to stock.

James W. Brown opened his shop at the historic crossroads of Falls Church in 1883. The town got its name from the nearby chapel where George Washington had been a vestry. Some believe first lady Dolley Madison may have passed through the area to flee a burning Washington, D.C., during the War of 1812.

About 70 years later — when the Washington Monument was nearing completion — Brown’s Groceries and Hardware opened for business. Thieves tried to dynamite the store’s safe in 1884 and blew out the front of the place, Taylor said, but they never breached the lock.

The business passed down three generations to Hugh Brown, James W. Brown’s great-grandson. Before dying in 2018 at age 92, he arranged for Taylor — who was hired in 1997 — to become owner of the store when he was gone. Taylor said Brown knew he would carry on his legacy after taking over.

Taylor has worked at the store long enough to remember the “Snowmaggedon” blizzard of 2010, when shovels and sleds were flying off the shelves. He said he rang one of the highest-grossing sale days he’d ever seen at Brown’s. During the coronavirus pandemic, the store stayed open because it was considered an essential business, Taylor said. But inflation and supply-chain issues caused chaos.

The last day will be March 31. Stoic amid these final weeks, Taylor said it was sad to keep a place going through so many challenges just to see it close.

It was no secret that commercial real estate developers had been hungry for his space. Last year, there was a good offer for the property and it was sold, Taylor said.

Regular clientele appreciated that Brown’s sold things in small quantities, unlike many big-box stores. The staff would sometimes fix a broken toy, a loose lacrosse mask or a busted hose free of charge.

Now, with most items at half price, customers were buying everything from glass display cases to wood shelving. The battered safe is expected to go to the city of Falls Church.

Trent Brooks, a 70-year-old customer from Northeast Washington, recently bought the four-person staff hamburgers for lunch. He said news of the store’s closure was a “gut punch.”

John Lawrence, 64, said his teenage son landed his first job there. He chuckled a bit, remembering that Brown’s didn’t offer direct deposit for paychecks.

The business mostly resisted the trappings of computers and digital merchant systems. But the modern world caught up with it, Taylor said, as shoppers increasingly chose Amazon over in-store purchases.

Taylor jokes that he’ll soon be a minor nuisance to his wife. “I’ve been working six days a week most of my life,” he said. “I don’t have a lot of hobbies. This is my hobby — work.”

He’ll do occasional odd jobs with retirement. But nothing will replace regular shifts at the store.

“It’ll be nice to have a month or two off,” Taylor said. “But then after that, it’s going to be, ‘What do I do now?’”

For now, the task was to sell as much of the store as possible and say goodbye to familiar faces.

Peter Byrd, 69, who works at Foxes Music Company nearby, surveyed the patchwork of empty tea green, rose pink and golden brown pegboard covering the walls. “I never once came here when they didn’t have what I was looking for,” he said.

He picked through the bins, looking for something to buy. Then, he sighed.

“This is America,” he said.

A previous version of this article incorrectly said that George Washington had been a vestry. He was a member of the vestry.

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Ever since Elizabeth Shipley-Moses and her husband John moved to Falls Church, Virginia, in 1977, they’ve been deliberate about shopping at Brown’s Hardware.

If she needs a screw, a store staff member will find one. When there are things that she thinks are fixable, but that nobody else wanted to fix, those same workers offered their support.

At larger retail stores, Shipley-Moses said, you can buy a package of 100 screws. At the Falls Church shop, customers can get just what they need.

“It’s very sad,” Shipley-Moses said, after telling a store worker that she’d be back soon to say goodbye, before the store closes for good. “Pretty soon we won’t have stores like this.”

The shop, which James Brown launched in the 1800s as a general store, stayed in his family for three generations. It evolved into a full-service hardware store, which cuts glass, repairs screens and windows and sells plumbing, electrical and garden supplies. They emphasized customer service, which helped them compete with nearby Home Depot.

But the Brown family suspected there would come a time that the business wouldn’t be worth as much as the property. John Taylor, the current owner, said the executor of the family’s estate received an offer that was too good to pass up.

Current plans, Taylor said, have the space being transformed into a restaurant. The closing on the real estate is set for April 1, but he said, “We will probably be here pretty much to the end.”

ARLNow first reported the store’s plans to close.

“The offer that came through was good, and at the time, he (the executor) thought it was time to do it,” Taylor said.

The store has been on the same corner for 142 years, Taylor said. When Route 29 was expanded, a new store had to be built.

Brown’s has been a community fixture for so long, at one point, the shop had the only phone line to the only doctor in town.

Many of the store’s customers live within walking distance, Taylor said, or within a mile or two by car. The shop offered free delivery for mulch, and focused on the “little things,” such as lamp and screen repair.

Business soared during the pandemic, because many people worked from home, but there’s been a “steady decline” every month ever since, Taylor said.

“We weighed in all the factors — declining business, how people would come in and they’d say, ‘Well, thanks for the help, but I punched my phone in here, and I still can get it cheaper on Amazon or at Home Depot, so I’m going to go there,’” Taylor said.

“That’s kind of disheartening when that kind of stuff happens after you spent 15 minutes working with the customer on plumbing or something,” he added.

Some of the older residents will struggle, Taylor suspects, because they don’t have technology to be able to assist them with a plumbing or paint job or electrical repair.

But a new Whole Foods opened across the street from Brown’s, and there are new condominiums too, “so that’s just a sign of the times. That’s what they want. They want the tax base, and that’s about the end of that,” Taylor said.

Many of the neighborhood’s younger residents, Taylor said, are buying big houses with small yards, and they have an HOA that maintains the lawn and handles repairs.

“It’s just a different generation coming up now,” Taylor said. “It’s not going to be the same ever again.”

John Moses called Brown’s a “fixture in the city.”

“Things don’t last forever,” Moses said. “Considering when this started, it’s amazing it lasted this long.”

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Scott Gelman is a digital editor and writer for WTOP. A South Florida native, Scott graduated from the University of Maryland in 2019. During his time in College Park, he worked for The Diamondback, the school’s student newspaper.

It’s been long awaited, but now it’s here. The saga of bringing a mega-Whole Foods supermarket to downtown Falls Church was slated to culminate with an official grand opening this morning (Thursday, Feb. 7) with the full Falls Church A-List crowd expected to be on hand.

Today’s opening of the 45,000 square foot market culminates a full decade of hopes, ups and downs, headaches, anticipation and grit. Now, the historic Broad (Rt. 7) at Washington (Rt. 29) center of Falls Church has a bright and lively anchor that, in addition to everything else going on here, will act like a beacon for shoppers, investors, hungry kids and many more by the thousands to bring their collective resources to bear right here in the Little City.

Yes, it’s taken a full decade! The May 11, 2015 headline in the News-Press announced plans for a “Flagship Whole Foods” rise at the intersection. In the interim, a principal in the HITT company which had acquired the 2.5 acres there was arrested for business fraud, the Insight Development Group took control of the land and its development, the clashes with neighboring businesses and nearby residents over limiting the disruptions that the development would cause were resolved, the Covid epidemic crisis, and otherwise general ebbs and flows of business and life in general did not deter the eventual arrival of this memorable day.

In the meantime, the very formidable Harris Teeter store just up the street was built, like the Insight property, as a mixed use project with hundreds of apartments above, as has been the Founders Row 1 and 2 seven blocks to the west, and the Hoffman Group’s dense 10-acre West Falls Gateway development a few more blocks further beyond.

Now, above the Whole Foods are the more than 300 apartments that are already 59 percent occupied, and next week will mark the formal opening of a new space in the same project as the new home of the City’s truly iconic Creative Cauldron theater troupe. A grand opening for the Creative Cauldron’s new digs is set for Thursday, Feb. 13, at 1 p.m. Work is also underway for the opening of a Little Beast Cafe and Bistro there.

Among the bigger new entities gearing up for opening in the Little City in the coming months are the Paragon motion picture theaters (still set to open in April) at Founders Row 1 and the GrillMarx steakhouse on S. Washington.

With the sale of the historic Brown’s Hardware directly across the street from the Whole Foods and the looming revival of the Atlantic Realty large scale mixed use development project above Ireland’s Four Provinces caddy-corner from the Whole Foods, and a thriving State Theatre live music venue operating only a few doors away, the Little City will be rocking and rolling, and looking to attract many more patronizers of all these shiny new options for enjoying a good life.

There is the imminent demolition of the back building of the old Stratford Motel that will make way for a new Stratford Gardens eatery and plans for the opening of the Little Falls Cafe just off W. Broad on N. Maple. There will be a Tatte Bakery and Cafe and

Three more supermarkets are in the works, too. There is the Fresh Market that will go into the West Falls development, an as-yet-unnamed market to go into the former Mini-Target site on S. Washington, and rumors of a Trader Joe’s going into the Atlantic Realty plan.

At this Tuesday’s meeting of the Falls Church Economic Development Authority (EDA), now chaired by former City Council member Ross Litkenhous since the untimely passing of Bob Young, a summary of new developments was presented by Becky Witsman of the City’s Economic Development Office showing that all the new dwellings in the mixed use projects that have opened in the City since 2002 are well over 90 percent occupied.

The Broadway, Byron, Read and Spectrum projects are all reported in as 100 percent full, while the 301 W. Broad (above the Harris Teeter), and the Modera and Verso residential sites at Founders Row 1 are all over 90 percent full, as are the Northgate, Pearson Square and Tinner Hill projects. The Adler at the still-being-built Founders Row 2 is already 10 percent full.

A big sign is now up for the Fish Taco restaurant about to open in Founders Row 1 where Ellie Bird, Nue, Role Play, Seoul Prime, Chasin Tails, Kyo Matcha, Kyuramen, Lil’ Cakes and Creamery, and Tiger Dumpling are operating, and Cafe Semicolon is set to open.

At the West Falls development, permits are either about to or have been let to Burger Fi, Honoo Ramen and Bar, Mason’s Famous Lobster Rolls and Dok Khao Thai Eatery, Ice Cream Jubilee, and a big new Fresh Market on the corner of W. Broad and Haycock, staring down the long-established Giant Food market in the Birch and Broad Center run by Federal Realty.

The West Falls and Birch and Broad centers are across the street from the Gordons Road Triangle which was the subject of an extensive two-day Urban Land Institute evaluation held at the Hilton Garden Inn last week aimed at optimizing the potential for that area. Major land owners there are the Beyer family and the City of Falls Church.

While there was a lot to unpack, as they say, in that area, the ULI team did not explore how that area could be integrated into what the West Falls and Federal Realty properties may have in store. The West Falls are adjacent HITT and WMATA properties that are being developed in tandem with a common road through all three connecting W. Broad and the West Falls Church Metro Station.