Cans of Paint and a Handshake

The Edgartown Hardware Store has long been a place where not only could you buy your paint, garden hoses, scallop baskets, art supplies, light bulbs and sheetrock screws for that weekend home project, but whatever you bought came with an important add-on at no extra charge: customer service.

Walk through the door of the hardware store that has been a fixture in the center of Main street Edgartown for more than fifty years and someone will ask if you need help. If the answer is yes, you will be guided politely to the place where your item of interest can be found. Need advice on what kind of caulk to buy? They have plenty of good advice too at Edgartown Hardware. This is a place where the owners long maintained an old-fashioned card catalogue with the records of all customer paint purchases, so if you decided to repaint the bathroom ten years after and forgot to write down the color, they would look it up for you. Color discontinued? At Edgartown Hardware they can mix up a custom batch to match the kitchen cabinets.

Edgartown Hardware is a living version of that old slogan: If you can’t find what you need there, you probably don’t need it.

About the only thing this venerable old store doesn’t have is more space and enough parking, and that is why it is moving out of town, to the spot formerly occupied by the Old Colony car dealership that has been long vacant at the edge of town. The move was approved by the Edgartown zoning board of appeals last week amid many heartfelt expressions of support for the hardware store, tinged with sadness at the prospect that Main street would lose yet one more anchor, year-round business.

“The only core business left is leaving,” said board chairman Martin V. Tomassian Jr.

You could almost hear the sighs around the room, and around the whole town, at the news.

What will be left when the hardware store leaves — one more fleeting tourist shop, or worse, a vacant building? Main street Edgartown is already badly blighted by the Yellow House, as it was known, which has stood vacant and crumbling for too many years now on the corner of Main and Summer streets, a depressing symbol of irresponsible landlords who ignore their civic duties as owners of these downtown buildings.

They are the ones who should leave, and turn their buildings over to an owner who will invest in them — with money and with love.

Just as Edgartown Hardware has done for all these years.