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It was the last discount grocery store in downtown New Bedford.
Family Dollar was.
And now it’s gone. Packed up, cleaned out, stripped down — all within a matter of weeks.
So even as downtown New Bedford has experienced a mini-boom in housing starts over the last few years, there is neither a grocery store nor a convenience store in the center city.
Yes, you can get to Walgreens drug store if you’re brave enough to scoot across the eight roads feeding into The Octopus, where some of the walk signals on the traffic lights have been broken for months. But even if you get there, Walgreens groceries are neither as convenient nor as inexpensive as Family Dollar.
It’s not that Family Dollar was perfect — far from it. There wasn’t much, if anything, in the way of fresh fruits or vegetables there. And some of the coolers had not been operating for more than a year. The air conditioning would go down.
A store whose coolers once carried milk, sausages, eggs, cheese and frozen foods was mostly down to soft drinks and juice at the end. Multiple people have told me that after the refrigeration and air conditioning broke in recent years, the equipment didn’t get fixed, at least not in any sort of permanent way.
But whatever you wanted to say about it, the downtown New Bedford Family Dollar was right there, in the heart of Purchase Street. If you needed food that was canned or boxed, a household good like a battery, toilet paper or maybe some laundry soap, Family Dollar was convenient. For the senior citizens and disabled folks who live in Olympia Towers or the New Bedford Hotel, people without easy access to transportation, the store was around the corner and it was cheap.
That’s not nothing in the food and grocery desert that is downtown New Bedford.
It wasn’t, of course, just seniors and low-income folks who used Family Dollar. There are a growing number of market-rate apartment and condo dwellers in the downtown, and Family Dollar was the nearest outlet that most resembled either a convenience or department store.
“It doesn’t matter what someone’s overall income is, eventually, they’re going to be going to a Family Dollar,” said Mike O’Sullivan, the CEO of the One SouthCoast Chamber business group for Fall River and New Bedford.
O’Sullivan also said that as the economy changes there is always going to be a little bit of tension as businesses come and go. But change brings opportunity, he said.
“That area of Union Street offers a fantastic opportunity because so much housing is going in there,” he said, describing the main downtown New Bedford street.
Despite its problems, some folks were worried about the store leaving without a replacement.
“I think it’s kind of sad,” said Russell J. Ramos, 67, who both lives and works within a block of Union Street. The convenience was “really important,” he said. “The things that you need, the basics, were there for the community.”
Folks who used the downtown Family Dollar knew all about the equipment breakdowns. So a few weeks ago when there was a sign that the store would be temporarily closed, it did not seem that unusual. But then a few days later another sign appeared in the front window that announced the store was closing for good.
The next thing you know, young folks were standing on Union Street corners holding going-out-of-business signs. The store, which had opened to much fanfare 23 years ago, was mobbed in its closing days as people loaded up their carts with the steeply discounted items.
A 2003 Standard-Times story when Family Dollar first came to Purchase Street, announced that it had a lease with options for up to 25 years with the owners of the building, the Saltmarsh family.
The Saltmarshes were and are a New Bedford institution. They long ran a popular five-and-dime book store and gift shop in the downtown. It was the kind of place where you could always find just the right gift.
Generations of the Saltmarshes lived upstairs in the four-story structure, right in the heart of the city. The local family was Family Dollar’s landlord on a lease that would have run out at the end of 2027.
The Saltmarshes were the kind of New Bedford merchants people knew personally and loved.
Patrick Saltmarsh, son of the late Robert J. Saltmarsh who ran the Saltmarsh’s for many years, said Family Dollar decided to exit its lease before it was up. The company has recently been sold to capital investors and has closed hundreds of stores over the last several years. It was evidently so determined to leave the downtown store that they had asked to shorten their last lease extension and stopped investing in repairing the store’s equipment.
Saltmarsh is not a guy who likes to conduct business in the media, but I was persistent in trying to track him down. The four-story, L-shaped building is up for sale, which he said already has two separate entities very interested in it.
The building is now being marketed separately for its first-floor retail space and for condominium units in the upper floors. The entire building is being marketed as a whole, too.
“I have interest in both the entire building and in the retail space,” Saltmarsh said.
For what it’s worth, I don’t know of another building like the Saltmarsh’s 771-777 Purchase St. structure. The retail space is more expansive than anything else currently in the downtown, and the building is located smack in the middle of the most important street in the commercial district. It’s arguably the most important developable spot in the downtown.
Although federal funding to incentivize development has dried up, Saltmarsh said there is still state funding for Gateway Cities like New Bedford. MassHousing (the Massachusetts Housing Finance Agency) has already awarded him a technical assistance grant to pay for a feasibility study of the historical significance of the structure, which was built in 1884.
It’s been a long New Bedford story for the Saltmarsh family.
In 1909, Saltmarsh’s grandfather, Robert C. Saltmarsh, bought Hutchinson’s, a predecessor department store to Saltmarsh’s that was located on the block of Union Street where the New Bedford Harbor Hotel is now located.
Patrick Saltmarsh grew up in the Purchase Street building where the store later moved to that location. His family lived there from 1975 to 1987, and then when he got married, he lived there again in the 1990s and early aughts. “We were the only residents of the downtown for decades,” he said.
Saltmarsh said he sympathizes with the downtown residents who will miss the Family Dollar store. “Hopefully, the new tenants will fill that void, and maybe expand it for the additional residents who now live downtown.”
He loves the downtown, Saltmarsh said. “I’ve seen it in its heyday and I’ve seen it when it had its skinned knees and skinned pants,” he said.
After the closure was announced, social media was replete with comments that the downtown store had been dirty and the workers inattentive. Carol Medeiros, one of the commenters at the SouthCoastToday site, tried to put all the negativity into context.
“I liked the store in that area and the products they carried,” she wrote. “It just needed to be cleaned up today and better workers.”
Though the store had obvious problems, it was always busy whenever I was there. I’m not the only person who thought so.
“Every time I went to Family Dollar, there was a line,” said Marlene Pollock, one of the directors of the Coalition for Social Justice. “We won’t know what we’ve lost until we’ve lost it.
“If you don’t have a car and need a can of orange juice, there’s not many options in the downtown,” said Corrin Williams, the longtime executive director of the Community Economic Development Center. The mission of the CEDC is to help working folks in the city start businesses and maintain them.
Folks who live and walk in the downtown or people in town to use the Community Health Center would use Family Dollar, Williams said. The health center caters to uninsured and under-insured folks, customers who are well familiar with Family Dollar.
“You really need a retail mix” in New Bedford between the new businesses in the historic district and discount shops, Williams said.
Saltmarsh and the leaders of local business groups are on the same page when it comes to seeing the vacancy at the Family Dollar building as an opportunity. But that opportunity probably won’t be the same as in the past.
In the past two years, no fewer than three multi-story apartment buildings have been built on the Union Street blocks in the downtown and a fourth is being constructed at the former site of the Keystone Building.
Derek Santos, the longtime executive director of the nonprofit New Bedford Economic Development Council, said downtown New Bedford has changed in recent years. It used to be that it suffered from competition with the suburban malls and their free parking. Nowadays it competes with an online market where everything can be easily found, ordered and delivered.
“More and more when folks go downtown, it’s about experience-based shopping,” Santos said. So restaurants and shops like Solstice, the skateboard store, or Aviary Books, a used book shop, make sense.
Aviary Books, formerly located on a second floor on Pleasant Street, is having great success on lower William Street, across from the Whaling Museum.
It’s hard to say exactly what happened with the downtown Family Dollar. The chain operates five other outlets across the city that seem to be doing well. Saltmarsh said company officials told him the downtown store did north of a million dollars in business each year of the last decade.
Officials with the Family Dollar chain did not respond to three emails from me.
The rise of the online marketplace would certainly have affected the discount retailers like Family Dollar as much as any other retailer in recent years. And the chain has opened two nearby Family Dollars over the last few years, one on Kempton Street in the West End and one on Route 6 in Fairhaven. Both have parking lots and could certainly pick up some of the slack of the nearby downtown store. The Kempton Street store would be walkable for at least some folks in the downtown.
Dollar Tree, the former owner of Family Dollar, sold the Family Dollar chain to two capital investment companies last year, and since then hundreds of stores have closed. Analysts cite the tough economic climate along with reduced government assistance under the Trump administration as reasons for the restructuring.
Meanwhile, the opportunity is there for a fresh development at 771-777 Purchase St.
The NBEDC has worked with Patrick Saltmarsh several times about ideas for the upper stories of his four-story building, Santos said. But he has not yet discussed the first-floor retail space.
“We look at the glass as half-full,” Santos said of the downtown.
Well, the glass is half full on Purchase Street where almost all the storefronts are rented. But on Union Street I counted 12 empty storefronts last week.
On the other hand, it’s certainly true that the last block of Union Street has had a boom of restaurants and pubs in recent years. Several clothing shops have done well, including Circa, midway up Union, and Celia’s over on Pleasant Street across from City Hall.
The NBEDC is the city’s principal economic development agency and Santos said it has done several studies over the years about the possibility of bringing a supermarket to downtown New Bedford. That would be a great replacement for Family Dollar but the results of the EDC studies have shown there is not a large enough population to support one, Santos said.
Earlier this year, Metta, a corner grocery store on Union Street, opened and focused on specialty items as well as fresh fruits, vegetables and lunches from the nearby Spicy Lime restaurant. After one of the worst winters in recent memory, it closed. Yum Yum Tiger on Purchase Street, which bills itself as an Asian mini-market, currently sells everything from Asian chips to sauces to sweets, and you can cook your own ramen there.
It seems more like one of the experiential shops that Santos referred to than a grocery store.
Santos said it may be time for updated research on what kind of grocery store, including a small grocery, the area might support.
All the signs point to a changing downtown, with many more people living in the area. The Arts and Business Council of Greater Boston in the not-too-distant future will fully open its big arts and nonprofits-centered establishment half way up Union.
The building at 771-777 Purchase St. where Family Dollar was located may well be developable as living space now. It’s easy to envision either a small grocery store or a series of small shops being located there, as Patrick Saltmarsh suggests. Maybe the demographic it caters to could be mixed.
That would be a downtown improvement worth waiting for.
Jack Spillane is a reporter and columnist for The New Bedford Light. He can be reached at jspillane@newbedfordlight.org.
