The Vermont Market and Pharmacy in Carroll Gardens closed a dozen years ago, yet the store sits mysteriously vacant in a now-gentrified Carroll Gardens.The combination drugstore and market, which once sold Vermont specialties, sits at the corner of Henry and Sackett Streets across from a cafe and a trendy new dumpling house.
Owner Mark Stein still visits.
Neighbors say Stein is a recluse who wears suspenders and prefers to walk in the street, a genius with a deep knowledge of homeopathy and a university job.
Stein is characterized as "an elusive guy" by Adam Parke, who partnered with him the mid-1990s to open the Vermont Market. According to Parke, Stein "comes and goes in the middle of the night”, and has "never fit" in the neighborhood.
On a recent evening, Stein appeared unexpectedly at his store carrying a backpack and wearing a green hat and rolled-up jeans -- and walking in the street.
“It didn’t quite work out,” he said about the market.
Stein started Mark's Pharmacy there in the 1980s after his father bought the building. It was an attempt to revive the full-service pharmacies of the 1930s and 40s.
Around 1996, Stein and some partners opened the Vermont Market and Pharmacy.
The store closed within a year or so because business was slow. Stein said it had sat unused all these years because he did not want to give a tenant a long-term lease, and because he did not know what to do with it.
Stein envisions “some kind of a holistic or community space.”
The Vermont Market was ahead of its time, he said.
The article from the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/22/nyregion/22store.html?scp=1&sq=filling+in+a+few+blanks+in+an+old+brooklyn+real+estate+mystery&st=nyt
More on the now-gentrified Carroll Gardens neighborhood, from AM New York:
http://www.amny.com/news/local/am-city1002,0,5039159.story
